A young man in bloodied white cultivator’s robes sat on the edge of a cliff, smoking a cigarette made of spirit herbs. As he drew in each breath, he used his technique to transform the heavenly energies trapped in the spirit herbs into qi, drawing it into his dantian just below his navel and cycling it through his meridians, rejuvenating his flesh… for what it was worth. The dagger thrust into his abdomen had also cracked his dantian, and most of the qi that made it in simply spilled out, along with a burning pulsating pain that normally would have made it hard to think.

Behind him, more than a dozen men in identical robes lay fallen, most of them pierced through the heart or the throat by precise strikes of a spear, similar to the one with the cracked haft of blue spirit wood lying on the edge of the cliff by his right hand. A few showed signs of having burst open from within, and one was little more than a charred stick-figure lying on the stone. The air around him was full of quickly-dispersing qi from their deaths, which he normally would have collected as a matter of course, as was only right for the victor.

Unfortunately, he was pretty sure he was dying.

Normally, just being stabbed in the area around his dantian wouldn’t have cracked it. At his rank of cultivation, the dantian wasn’t even a physical organ anymore. However, the inscriptions on the dagger were meant for precisely that purpose, so he now found himself slowly running out of the qi he needed to maintain his life, as well as lacking the necessary draw to take in the qi he should have been able to claim.

“I guess I should have put more effort into body cultivation,” He mused as he lit another cigarette, tossing the scraps of the finished one off the edge of the cliff carelessly. Pills would have been better, but his body couldn’t process them without an intact dantian, so he was screwed.

If he was a body cultivator, he could have forced a temporary repair of his dantian until he found a spirit doctor capable of healing it completely. However, he had always been a bit lazy and averse to physical training beyond what was absolutely necessary to make his body ready for the next stage. His will refinement and qi refinement had always seemed more than enough for what he was aiming to become… a barely above mediocre cultivator.

He wasn’t interested in the eternal conflicts of his fellows. He had the talent to rise like a star, but he was only ever really interested in rising to a certain level. After all, after he finished forming his core, he had thousands of years to enjoy. Why bother trying to rise any higher?

Not that he was without ambition. His birth world was a medium-ranking cultivator world, meaning the highest could reach the lowest ranks of Immortals if they had many fortunate encounters and resources. He, however, was doomed to be stuck two steps away from that dream, due to… circumstances…

Unfortunately, someone had gotten the wrong idea about him at some point, since he managed to rise to his current stage while still a youth. As a result, a dozen assassins of his own stage were sent after him, with the intention of killing or crippling him if possible.

He managed to kill them easily enough, but one of them had a last-stand pill of some sort in his mouth and managed to gain an extra second of life, plunging the dagger into his dantian when he let his guard down, thinking things were over.

He sighed for the hundredth time since he’d come to realize his death was approaching. The place he currently sat was well out of range of his communication talismans, and the remaining qi in his dantian would only let him fly a few hundred kilometers before it gave out and left him as prey to the spirit beasts in the woods.

All that effort enduring assaults on my mind and spirit to build my will, all that time spent cultivating and mastering techniques, learning the Dao… all of it useless, He mused. He was only forty, a child by cultivator standards. Considering the resources that were put into raising him up, he felt a bit remorseful for letting this happen.

His clan had always thought him odd, an eccentric talent that was nonetheless the best of their generation. As such, they had poured the entirety of their resources into raising him up as fast as possible. He’d let them, because he didn’t see any reason not to. He’d heard the Dao easily since his early childhood, so he found it easy to rise through the early stages. He’d learned a part of the Dao of Fire at a very young age, as well as the Dao of the Spear, making him dangerous as a combat cultivator. He’d even mastered the basics of picking out and raising spirit herbs, as well as alchemy with little trouble, though his natural inclinations didn’t go in that direction. The cigarette he was smoking was of his own creation, made from low-ranking spirit herbs whose only value was in that they had pure heavenly energies, devoid of any ‘color’. As a result, they were perfect for making low-grade, low-toxicity qi pills and could be processed by anyone, even a non-cultivator, without problems.

He usually smoked them when bored between cultivation sessions, as they didn’t add enough qi to his dantian to disrupt it in any way. Now they were a temporary lifeline, extending his life by a few minutes for each one he smoked.

“Young man, you have gotten yourself into something of a mess,” An old man suddenly sat on thin air in front of him, dressed in sky-blue robes, caressing his long white beard as he examined the dying cultivator.

“It is of little moment. I am just another cultivator who is doomed to collapse along the path,” He said, offering a lit cigarette from his ring to the old man.

Amused, the old man took it, placing it between his lips and taking in a deep breath, his brows rising in surprise, “This is good… what did you use to flavor it?”

“Sishingi blossoms. No natural qi, but they make the smoke taste sweet,” The young cultivator replied calmly, even as he noted that his ability to keep his blood inside his body was on the verge of failure due to lack of qi.

“Ah, good choice,” The old man nodded in approval as he blew purple-tinged smoke out of his nose.

“I thought so too. I used to use shredded furuzi root, but the girl who cleaned my rooms told me I stink when I smoked it,” He said, his expression faintly nostalgic.

“Ah, some people like the smell, but the ones that hate it, really hate it,” The old man commented.

For a time, they were silent. The young cultivator had no idea who the old man was, but that mattered little to him at this point. He wasn’t stupid enough to open his spiritual sensed to find out, either. He had a feeling it would be an awful idea.

“Do you mind if I claim the spear once you are gone?” The old man asked, gesturing to the weapon at his side. Though the haft was cracked, the blade – made of narantia mixed with the powdered fangs of an ancient dragon – was perfectly intact. It was a long blade, almost long enough that it could have been used as a short jian on its own. It was also a family treasure.

However, that was of little importance to a man that was about to die, so he shrugged, “I have no argument against it. However, if I don’t miss my guess, are you not far above such a mediocre weapon?”

The old man chuckled, “Ah, so you figured me out, eh? Yes, if I tried to use it, it would crumble to dust in my hands. The blade might withstand one strike, but the haft, even if it weren’t cracked, would not last a second of my qi’s touch. I am not the best at holding back, you see.”

“Curiosity, then?” The dying cultivator asked, his lips curving upward in a faint smile born of grim amusement.

“There was that… but I also wanted to know why you were so intent on wasting your talent? You could easily have avoided the dagger thrust if you had chosen to,” The old man observed.

“Ah, so you saw that? Apologies for showing you something unsightly. Yes, I could have avoided the strike to my dantian easily enough, though I would have taken a cut on my hip or arm instead,” The young man admitted.

“Answer the question,” The old man commanded, his voice still mild. However, the air around them became heavy with the force of his irritation.

The smile never fell from the young cultivator’s lips, “I guess you could say I have no desire to live for a clan that sees me as a tool for its rise to power.”

His thought patterns were more than a little heretical for a cultivator. Most cultivators had a strong sense of loyalty to their clan, willingly living a life to meet the expectations of those around them, only leaving them behind if they reached the Immortal ranks, and sometimes not even then.

He had never felt that way. He had hated the way his clan forced obligation upon him, an obligation to progress, a pressure to become a force, a true power. It was not that he hated cultivating. He enjoyed it to a degree, especially figuring out how to use various techniques with his qi and searching for the Dao. However, he loathed the way his clan pressured him, forcing him to practice with Fire techniques that didn’t suit him, forcing him to progress faster than he believed was good for his foundation… there were dozens of instances where he deeply resented what they were doing to him.

This was actually born of his talent for cultivation. He had always instinctively understood when his cultivation was not progressing the right way, but his clan had always forced him to pursue the path they desired. As a result, he had dozens of techniques that were unsuited for his Daos, and he was forced to use a cultivation technique that didn’t fit his nature.

“Hmm… how unfortunate. You realized they were ruining your potential and didn’t have any way to do anything about it, eh?” The old man said thoughtfully.

“I wasn’t strong enough to stop them until it was too late. My strength would have been capped two stages from now, in any case… strong for the region but not anywhere near what I could have achieved if I picked another cultivation technique,” He said with a little bitterness.

Yes, if he had had the ability to pick another cultivation technique, he would have been able to make his own way forward. He had the talent, the gift for the Dao necessary. Unfortunately, he was crippled by his family’s preconceptions about the quality of their family cultivation technique and tradition that was an antique when his great-grandfather was born.

“I can’t save your current life, but my Dao of Cycles can give you another chance, though you won’t be blessed with a powerful family with many resources like this life,” The old cultivator offered.

“Reincarnation?” He asked curiously.

“All I can do is make it possible for you to recall your memories at the moment your next body becomes capable of cultivating… if it does. As I said, it is just a chance,” The old man warned.

“Not all worlds have the energy to cultivate, after all,” He murmured, “So what do you want from me other than the spear?”

“I want you to willingly offer up your dantian, cracked as it is. I have a use for it,” The old man said bluntly.

“Very well, a small price to pay for a chance at another life as myself,” The young cultivator assented. A moment later, everything was blackness.

_____________________________________________________________________________

The old man felt the young cultivator’s soul pass onto the wheel through his Dao, adjusting it along the way – just slightly – so the boy’s soul would recall his previous life and retain most of its current refinement. The boy had done a good job at tempering his spirit, even if he had failed utterly with his body.

More importantly, he withdrew his hand from the deceased cultivator’s navel, a green jade orb surrounding the cracked dantian, preserving it a moment before death. Given willingly, there were all sorts of uses for such a thing, even at his level of cultivation. He had a daughter with no dantian that could use the talent granted, even if it was a bit slanted toward Yang compared to his preference. Younglings with talent were rarely willing to give up that talent, in his experience, and it would be trivial for him to repair the damage once it was cleansed of the boy’s cultivation and fused with his daughter.

He’d also left a gift with the boy that would appear when he needed it, though it was unlikely. Most worlds had no cultivation potential, and it would probably be many lives from now before he awakened once again. It would surprise the old cultivator not at all if the boy spent thousands of lifetimes as a mortal before he once again was born as a cultivator.

However, a promise was a promise. Whenever the boy became able to cultivate again, his memories would return.

He finished the cigarette and tossed it on the boy’s corpse, using a technique that instantly made the spark turn into a blue flame that burnt it to ash, leaving nothing behind.

The spear was nowhere to be seen as he departed, disappearing as if he had never been.

________________________________________________________________________________

Mary Torrance, a five year old girl with blonde hair and green eyes, suddenly closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose as a splitting headache hit her. Memories of another life suddenly flooded her mind, threatening her sanity briefly before absolute calm took over a moment later.

She looked around the school bus she was riding, confirming the reality around her, eyeing familiar faces to be sure she was still Mary Torrance of Austin, Texas.

… interesting, Her expression was unnaturally calm for a small child. If anyone sensitive to the spirit realm had been present, they would have been chilled and pressured as the refined will of a long-dead cultivator combined with the childish mind of a young American girl.

This realm’s qi density is extremely low… it will be difficult to progress here, She observed. She examined herself with her senses, finding a highly-talented body whose only real problem was a quite natural predisposition to Yin. Most of her previous life’s knowledge was based on cultivating Yang-tinted elemental qi, such as Fire and Lightning. Her current body was far more suited for Darkness or Ice, with an immense natural talent for Wood.

She could tell this by examining the energies that were most attracted to her body on this winter day. The sunlight’s qi seemed to avoid her, while the cold air’s Ice qi almost seemed to want to leap into her partially-blocked meridians.

That three of her body’s Gates were already open was a straight-out miracle, given the low density of Earth’s qi. Her dantian was empty, because she had never consciously drawn in qi in her life, and her open meridians were coated with a light dusting of impurities due to this.

Her closed meridians had blockages around the Gates with the same light plaque covering the walls.

All of the standard Gates present, though I won’t be able to tell whether there are any hidden ones until I’ve opened them all or found a way to test it, She observed happily. To be considered for cultivation training, one had to have a dantian capable of cycling qi and a full set of thirteen Gates. Otherwise, most cultivation methods simply wouldn’t work.

Opening the Gates was the first task given to any initiate of the Way, and it was one she was eager to begin. Her dantian was of above-average size, in her experience, and it would only take a few years to clear her Gates and meridians if she was careful.

However, she wasn’t looking forward to the harsh initiation that was required of any initiate… taking in the surrounding qi and pushing it through her open Gates. The Gate in her spine, the one in her chest, and the one in her kidney were open and ready to receive their baptism in fire… but all three were ones that were enormously painful to begin.

Moreover, she would need to stay away from her mother until she could clean her body after passing qi through each Gate. The stench of impurities being purged from the body was bad enough that it could permanently ruin clothing and leave a lingering stench in an unprepared room if one wasn’t careful.

The practicalities of beginning cultivation in a world where the spirituality was as low as this one were going to be a serious headache… but she had no intention of stopping.

There was also the issue of just why her former life’s will had returned. The local qi was strong enough to finish the first steps of the Way, but not to take it to its end. She had a vague sense that that will hadn’t awakened in over a hundred lifetimes, most of them spent on worlds with qi densities higher than Earth’s.

Something must be about to change, She mused. If so, she would need to prepare… she would ask her mother to send her to martial arts classes as soon as possible, though she wondered if the kind but strict woman would allow her daughter to pursue such un-girlish hobbies.

If all else failed, she would put herself through one of the old training regimes from her memories. They would be hard on a child’s body, but she had survived it in her previous life… so why not this one?

She logically realized that while Mary’s personality colored her thoughts, the sheer power of her previous life and the intense focus of a cultivator had blotted out Mary’s own motivations and desires. The fact that she couldn’t bring herself to care probably should have terrified her. No child of five years old had any business thinking about preparing for future trouble by abusing their body to become powerful.

However, now that the Way had been shown to her, its attraction was undeniable, and her previous life’s desire to freely pursue it only made her desires stronger.

________________________________________________________________________

As she predicted, Mary’s mother, Imelda Torrance, refused her daughter’s request without a second thought. She was a young-looking woman with black hair and bronzed skin who frequently wore crimson lipstick and wore a dark blue pantsuit to her job as a real estate agent.

Normally, she at least listened, but she had firm ideas about how a girl child should behave. Punching and kicking weren’t a part of that image.

So, quite naturally, Mary began practicing in secret. She attacked old pillows with forms she remembered from her previous lifetime, drilling them into her body until they became second nature. She ran until she wanted to drop in the late evening, keeping her steps as silent as possible while her mother slept. She even faked sleepovers so she could spend entire days focusing on her training.

All the while she slowly cycled her qi, scraping at the plaque on her meridian walls as she wore at the closed Gates with inhuman patience.

Without spirit herbs, pills, or gathering formations, she was limited to what qi she could gather through the generalized basic cultivation technique she had selected for opening her Gates. With every week, the local qi density became slightly – ever so slightly – higher, confirming her initial thought that something big was coming. Increases in a world’s qi density rarely occurred without upheaval, and she expected that it could hit at any time.

A month after the began the routine, her fourth Gate cracked open, and she had to quickly toss her filthy (and thankfully old) clothes into the garbage after she spent several hours scrubbing herself clean of the black gunk that caked her afterwards. A test with industrial-strength detergent had failed to completely remove the stench, so she just gave up.

Over the next four years, she managed to open all of her remaining known Gates, giving her a fully-functioning set of standard meridians to work with. To her delight, two other Gates were present adjacent to the one in her brain, leading to her eyes, and when she opened them, her eyes gained a purple ring that was only visible at very close range.

Removing the remaining plaque on her meridians took another three months of patient cycling, and it was at that point she was able to begin compressing qi as she drew it in, beginning the Gathering Stage.

When opening the Gates and during the Gathering Stage, there was almost no difference between cultivation methods. The basics of the Gathering Stage involved simply gathering qi and compressing it within one’s meridians. How dense the qi was when one progressed to the next stage determined the quality of one’s qi.

However, she as pretty sure she would be stuck on this stage for at least a decade. At nine years of age, she had gauged the growth of the qi density vs her own talent quite well, and, while she was an exceptional talent, the low qi density made it ridiculously hard to progress.

Opening her Gates had made her extremely healthy, giving her peak human levels of vitality that was rarely seen in modern times, even in athletes and martial artists. Since she shifted to hitting wooden boards a year and a half ago, her body had hardened beneath its distinctly childish appearance. She had had to hide bloodied knuckles, palms, elbows, and shins from her mother almost constantly for the first month, until her qi naturally reinforced her skin over those spots.

This was the closest she could get to body cultivation without special resources or an environment that could force it forward.

By the age of thirteen, she had managed to complete the first three of five ranks of the Gathering Stage. This made her naturally attractive, even though her features were only a bit more pretty than the average. As a result, she had to beat up several boys who thought being forceful with young women was a good idea, and she had to deal with the jealousy of the popular girls who were aiming for those boys.

Now I understand why my sisters always complained about men staring, She thought one day as she carefully flattened a boy with a palm strike, careful not to leave him with a concussion or any broken bones as he fell to the ground, dazed.

Her body already had its curves, due to accelerated development caused by her cultivation. Her skin was similar to that of her mother, naturally bronzed, though smoother than was really natural. She had inherited her father’s thin lips and severe gaze, though, making her gaze intimidating to some.

She wasn’t ‘ripe’ like some of the other early bloomers. However, she definitely earned the staring eyes of the boys in class.

She had to wear color contacts though, as her once emerald eyes had begun to take on a distinctive amber tint since she began cultivation, most likely due to a hidden bloodline. Such things often happened to cultivators that had something inhuman intermarry with their ancestors in the distant past. However, it was unlikely her mother would have understood.

Her father was mostly a distant figure. He spent eighteen hours a day at work, and he was only off a day every few weeks, which he usually spent sleeping or out on the town with her mother. Mary found his lifestyle to be more than a little disturbing, since he wasn’t able to take advantage of the money he made due to how much time he spent making it.

Mary didn’t really have friends. She made small talk with other girls in her group, but since she didn’t spend time with them outside of school, the relationship was even shallower than one would have expected from a girl her age.

When she completed high school, she immediately left home and began walking, not bothering with any of the usual matters such as school or getting a job. She used her martial arts to hunt wild prey in the wilderness of Texas, using knowledge she had gained of edible plants in combination with that to keep herself fed while she trained.

The wild areas of Texas had nearly triple the qi concentration of the cities, and as a result, she managed to reach the peak of the Gathering stage… and break through to the Foundation stage, something she had not thought would be possible until she was well into her twenties.

It was on a day only a few weeks after she broke through that she found out why the qi density had risen so much since her childhood…

_______________________________________________________________________________

As she lay atop a blanket spread across a bed of dry leaves, Mary’s eyes suddenly shot open as she felt the qi density in the air increase by tens, hundreds, thousands of times of what it was previous, quickly reaching a density equivalent to her previous life.

She immediately began cultivating her newly-selected Heavenly Demon Scripture, drawing as much of the qi in as possible while she waited for the other shoe to drop.

Qi Baptism in progress. Initializing installation of system interface into all sapient beings present… complete.

Analyzing individual potential… complete.

Forming Challenges based on qi density previous to Qi Baptism… complete.

Initialization… complete.

She blinked as the mechanical words flashed directly into her mind, then winced as something wormed its way into her spirit, while it also examined her body and cultivation emotionlessly.

Individiual potential analyzed… category: Cultivator, Skill-User. No potential for Class or Leveling systems detected.

Existing cultivation detected. Rewards granted for pre-System achievements.

Titles Granted: First Gate-Opener, First Gatherer, First to Foundation

Rewards: One Large Boon, One Small Boon, One Individualized Piece of Equipment, One Skill

Please concentrate on rewards to receive them.

One Large Boon Received. A Large Boon may be used to gain a single major concession from the System within the rules set down upon establishment.

One Small Boon Received. A Small Boon may be used to gain a single minor concession from the System within the rules set down upon establishment.

Spirit Jian received. Parts of a powerful Foundation Stage Beast and several natural treasures were used to create this weapon. If fed the appropriate materials, this weapon will grow over time.

Sever is received. One of the most basic skills that can be gained from System shops in newly Initialized worlds, this skill is based around the concept of severing. While at low levels, it is limited to enhancing the edges of bladed weapons or severing physical objects, there are no limits placed on its growth.

Still unable to move, she blinked again, and a page of information that seemed to describing her popped into her mind.

Name: Mary (all surnames have been removed until Tutorial is complete)

Age: 19

Titles: First Gate-Opener, First Gatherer, First to Foundation

Boons/Rewards: One Large, one Small

Potential: Cultivator, Skill-User

Cultivation: Foundation, NonAspected

Skill Setup: Sever [Empty] [Empty] [Empty] [Empty] [Empty]

Below it was a visualization of her cultivation, her meridians and dantian outlined in gold, the Gates in azure. A rune-like inscription was present on the back of her right palm in the picture, and she intuitively realized that was her new ‘Skill’.

This… is not what I was expecting, She admitted inside her mind. A jian with a hilt made of petrified wood and a pommel of polished bone now sat on her left hip in a black lacquered wood sheath. It was somehow mystically attached to her hip, rather than to the cheap leather belt holding her somewhat ragged jeans up.

She could move now, so she raised her right hand and examined the faint silver lines of the rune visible on the back of the palm. Her head started to hurt as she did so, and she felt the Dao within it, resonating with her long-lost Dao of the Spear. Weapon Daos were simple, compared to elemental or fundamental ones. Any cultivator who was good enough with a sword would eventually touch the Dao of the Sword. She could feel the resonance… but she could sense that it would require more devotion to the weapon before she managed to understand its Dao.

She drew the jian easily, eyeing the blade with admiration. The blade was of the same white bone as the pommel, yet it was about as heavy and dense feeling as a metal sword. She quickly went through a half-dozen partially-remembered forms from her previous life to accustom herself to its heft and balance.

Well, I have a weapon… and it spoke of Challenges, She said to herself thoughtfully as she sheathed the jian at her side.

She could sense a half-dozen large concentrations of qi in the area. From the feel of it, the ones to the south were of Wood or Earth, whereas the one to the north was Ice, the east was Death, and the West was… Lightning? Lightning, as an offshoot of Metal, was difficult for her to sense. Her affinity for it was weak compared to Wood, which was her sole Yang affinity.

Further out, from the direction of Lake Sandy Wells, she could sense a strong concentration of Water Qi that reminded her of the sirens her previous self had fought for the core of a strong ocean serpent she slew.

After some thought, she decided to go for the concentration of Ice, as it seemed the weakest of the concentrations, thus being ideal for her to gauge how difficult things would be.

Along the way, she toyed with the rune on her right hand, trying to figure out how to use the ‘skill’. Eventually, she managed to cut twigs from a nearby tree with her fingernails, and when she used her jian, she could cut through the trunks of trees as if they were made of butter.

Qi seemed to naturally gather in the rune over time, building up a store of neutral energy that could be used to unleash the skill. She thought that, with effort, she might be able to increase how much qi was stored there, and it was her hypothesis that that was one of the ways a ‘Skill-User’ could progress.

It was her supposition that the ‘System’ was about progression, as it mentioned vaguely familiar concepts such as Classes and Levels, though neither was relevant to her. As she walked, she breathed in the patterns of her Heavenly Demon Scripture, taking in the surrounding qi as the vortex of dense energy in her dantian swirled around, creating a draw on the surrounding heavenly energies.

In order to establish a Foundation, she would need to form a literal foundation of pillars of aspected qi, whether a single or multiple ones, and build her spiritual temple inside her dantian. Most stumbled in this stage, as it was the first one that required something complex of the cultivator, compared to the relatively simple act of cleansing the meridians and opening the Gates that was the first, and the act of gathering qi to form a qi sea and saturate the flesh that was the Gathering Stage.

Depending on one’s cultivation technique, the methods varied immensely. In her past life, she had had a decent foundation, but it wasn’t so firm that it had required a major Tribulation to reach the Core Formation Stage. Her cultivation technique hadn’t fit her body or spirit, so the heavens hadn’t required she undergo a major Tribulation to hit the next stage.

She heard screams in the distance, from one of the camp grounds, and she winced. Whatever the Challenges were, she seriously doubted the people camping in the state park were ready for them.

As she approached the Ice area, a faint chill began to fill the air, and within a few minutes, she heard her feet making crunching sounds as they crushed frozen dried leaves beneath her booted feet. She zipped up her down jacket and drew the jian, holding it loosely in her right hand as she continued forward.

She came across the first of the ice statues a few minutes later, that of a young woman with her mouth open wide to scream, trying to flee from whatever lay in the direction of her goal. The shattered remnants of two other ice statues were behind her, where what looked like a nude young woman made out of crystal popped shattered chunks into her fanged maw.

Without hesitation, she channeled sever through her jian and swept it through the creature’s skull, slicing through it without any resistance at all. It collapsed to the ground, shattering into dust and leaving a black-blue core on the ground where it had been crouched.

Ice Qi rewarded.

The System, whatever it was, had apparently awarded her qi for killing the enemy, qi that now formed a single crystal of pure Ice Qi that fell to the earth at her feet. She bent over and picked it up, popping it and the core into her backpack before continuing on. She took the opportunity to remove some of the extra clothing and rope from the pack to make room for future acquisitions, excitement rising from within her as she anticipated the rewards that could be gained from Challenges.

Entering Challenge: Defeat the Ice Maidens

Ice maidens… yes, I recognize a creature by an equivalent name from my old world… the first was a human woman who froze to death after being cast out by her husband, only for Ice Qi to fill her spirit and transform her into a monster that eats mortal men and transforms human women into her own… She thought, even as her jian swept through the transformed face of the woman behind her, obliterating her just like the first.

She collected the core and the awarded crystal full of pure Ice Qi and tossed them into her backpack before moving on, careful to make as little noise as possible while suppressing her qi so that it didn’t leave her body.

However, she failed to account for the potential methods by which an inhuman creature might find its prey, and the moment she came upon her next Ice Maiden, it immediately turned on her and charged, snarling silently as it used some sort of technique in an attempt to freeze her.

Mary deflected the blow of a clawed hand with the flat of her jian while dancing aside from the technique, slamming her knee into the elbow of the creature with a sharp crack that caused the limb to go limp briefly before cracking again and falling to the ground. The creature was undeterred, leaping at her again, it’s clawed left hand and oversized mouth reading to catch and devour her. Apparently, it gave up on turning her.

She gently redirected the creature’s remaining hand with a palm, striking with the other up under its chin with another crack. Slight pains and a deep chill hit her every time she touched the creature, but her qi was denser than that which it possessed. As such, it couldn’t invade her meridians, and she was able to follow up with an elbow strike that shattered its jaw, then a knife-hand that pierced the crack in its neck, taking off its head.

Using the jian would have been faster, but the qi used in sever was only slowly replenished and easily used up if she wasn’t careful.

She could feel the secrets of the Dao of Ice hidden in the Maidens as she fought them one after the other, and she sought to dig deep into the potential enlightenment as she fought. The Ice Maidens’ qi was invasive, seeking to chill the spirit and the body, freezing those with strong Yin into a moment of horror and pain. This freezing Dao was fundamental to Ice, and she found her understanding growing every time she punched, kicked, deflected, or threw the Maidens.

She recalled the freezing chill of a winter morning in the wilds, how it seeped into the skin, flesh and bone as she practiced, despite the warmth of her flowing blood. She recalled the woman frozen in ice, how veins of blue had been forming beneath the skin even before her transformation began.

She felt the surrounding qi flow into her rapidly as she fought, her mind in a dream state as she shattered Maiden after Maiden, taking them apart methodically even as her body flowed from strike to strike without a hint of hesitation. Suddenly, their Ice seemed to lose cohesion when it touched her skin, a surface amount returning to qi with every strike, block, or throw.

When the last Ice Maiden lay at her feet, her shoulders heaving with fatigue, Mary smiled, and a message appeared in her mind.

Challenge: Defeat the Ice Maidens- Complete. Calculating rewards…

You have achieved least enlightenment in the Dao of Chill, a sub-Dao of Ice. For being the fourth individual on your world to achieve enlightenment, you are granted one Small Boon.

Challenge Reward: You may select a spatial ring with four square meters of storage space or a single Gate Opening Pill

That was no choice, really, she picked the spatial ring, and a moment later, a simple silver band appeared around her right ring finger. She immediately stored her backpack and the cores and ice crystals on the ground.

The Gate Opening Pill was a treasure for someone just beginning the path of cultivation, but for someone like her, a spatial ring was far more valuable. It seemed these Challenges were meant for beginners… or at least the one she just completed was.

However, she found deep doubt that this was so. The Ice Maidens were a threat that would have destroyed any fledgling cultivator and most Gathering Stage cultivators. She didn’t know about Skill-Users or those who had Classes, but she had a feeling there was little difference this early in the game.

In the core of her dantian, there was now the first bricks of Ice that would one day become one of the pillars forming her foundation. That day was far off, but even just that little bit caused her body to produce a small amount of Ice Qi and allowed her cultivate it, as long as she was careful to keep it from taking complete control of her dantian. She had no desire to be a cultivator of a single element affinity, as she had no bloodline that predisposed her to a talent in that direction.

She considered her next steps… the remaining challenges were some Earth and Wood ones, a distant set of Water Challenges, and one that felt like Lightning. She immediately – and reluctantly – decided to reject Lightning. She had no talent for Metal or its child affinities in her current body.

As it was winter, there were few people present in Sandy Wells State Park. The group that were slain by the Ice Maidens were an exception, most likely there for rock climbing or simple camping by the lake. As such, there would likely be few rivals attempting the Challenges beside her.

She wanted to balance the qi in her dantian, so she headed for the concentrations of Wood and Earth, hoping to use the Yang in Wood to balance the pure Yin of Ice. Earth was a balanced element, possessing both Yin and Yang, and thus taking it in to her dantian would not harm her cultivation regardless of her final choices. The Heavenly Demon Scripture was based off of building a foundation of multiple opposing and complementary elements, the more the better. However, it had to be balanced, lest the foundation become unstable and easily shaken.

Fire and Lightning aren’t going to be options for me, so I’ll have to be careful about what I take in in the future, She thought as she jogged toward the concentrations of Wood and Earth.

She looked forward to collecting more of the pure qi crystals and beast cores, as well. They would serve to accelerate her development in the future.

For some reason, her body seemed to reject Fire and Lightning Qi, and her spiritual senses shied away from it. Considering that she had primarily used Fire and Lightning Qi in her previous life, it probably had something to do with the deal she made that gave away her dantian after her death.

If so, it was a small price to pay to inherit the sharpened will and memories of cultivation possessed by her previous self.

The closest Challenge turned out to be one of the Wood element. As she approached the area she sensed, she eyed a field of unnaturally bright flowers sitting in the midst of a winter forest.

… only an idiot would think that is natural, She thought with some amusement. However, at the same time, she felt an intense sense of wariness. The ‘flowers’ in the field looked like they were distantly related to a rather nasty predatory spirit plant she was familiar with from her old world… a devourer patch.

Devourer patches were Wood elemental monsters that pretended to be fields of flowers and ate insects and animals attracted by the potential food by putting them to sleep with pollen, then piercing them with roots to suck out their natural qi and life energy. Just like the Ice Maidens, it was a rather insidious choice to place on a world like Earth, where people had yet to learn to be wary of such things.

No Fire, no Earth, so I’m left with chopping my way through before the pollen renders me unconscious, She mused. It was only of the Gathering Stage, from what she could sense. However, the pollen of devourer patches was dangerous to those of higher stages in high enough concentrations.

Another strategy was needed, so she reluctantly searched through her memory for a technique that might help.

As she was in the Foundation Stage, Mary was now able to use techniques that utilized qi outside the body. Previously, she could only use internal techniques, such as those that accelerated healing or temporarily hardened her skin.

Completing the Gathering Stage also had the effect of finishing the process of saturating the body with qi. As such, Mary could extend her qi outside her body like a third limb, using it to form techniques that would preferably resonate with her Daos.

Currently, the only Dao she had was one of Ice, so Mary focused on tchniques that used neutral qi as she shuffled through the thousands of techniques she had memorized in her previous life.

Most were beyond Mary at this point, giving her a splitting headache to view due to the deep truths that resonated within them. That in itself could lead to discovering a Dao, but there was little meaning in seeking the Dao that way, as then she would only be copying someone else’s path along the Way.

In her past life, she was unable to escape mher family’s control, and thus she knew that she would never become an Immortal. Mary’s path to defying the heavens was built upon sand, as she had never once been able to make a choice that went against her clan’s will. However, she desired to see that which she would never have, so she made a hobby of collecting techniques and cultivation manuals from dead sects, memorizing them, then taking the bits and pieces she could use to modify her techniques so they would be individual to herself, even if it was no longer possible to undo the damage to her foundation caused by her family.

She eventually settled on a technique that served like a filter for the mouth, nose and eyes, meant to keep airborne toxins from entering the body through the facial orifices. It was a simple technique that, while preferably used with Wind qi, could be utilized with neutral qi, with some effort.

It took her the better part of three hours to get the shape right, and another hour to be sure it wouldn’t fail the moment she took a step. Hopefully, it would be enough.

She stepped into the patch with the jian in hand, and sure enough, the announcement she was expecting came an instant after the first root tried to latch onto her skin, only to be sliced away by her jian.

Entering Challenge: Survive the Devourer Patches

Suddenly, the devourer patch expanded until it was all she could see, as if it had taken over the forest around her. She could feel the echoes of a Dao she dare not try to witness in that moment, and she realized the difficulty of the Challenge was even higher than she had anticipated.

There is no way someone without knowledge and power could survive this, She thought with sudden rage. Whoever had made this… System was pretending to be fair while being anything but. More likely, the Challenges were intended to winnow those with potential, so that those from other worlds could claim Earth’s newborn resources for their own. That made a great deal more sense than it guiding people to power.

She slashed with her jian over and over, cutting apart roots, thorns, and vines that attempted to restrict, penetrate, or bind her in place. The toxic pollen only grew thicker, the only blessing she had being that her qi filter/barrier didn’t allow particles to cling to the outside.

She continued to walk forward, occasionally collecting green Wood crystals that fell when she managed to land a fatal blow on an individual devourer patch, causing a small area of the massive field to wither and turn brown. There was always one plant on the surface that served as the ‘prime root’ of the patch, and if it was killed, the patch as a whole was slain. Since they weren’t spirits or beasts, the plants didn’t leave cores behind, but she occasionally stored fresh petals from certain component plants she knew to be valuable for powders and pills. When she killed one, they left behind thumb-sized crystals, four times as large as the ice crystals from the Maidens.

However, she had no reason for joy. While her well of qi was deep even for her stage, it was not infinite, and the filter over her face was consuming a small amount every second that wasn’t fully recovered by her passive cultivation.

If she ran out of qi, she would die.

She turned around and looked at the path behind her with narrowed eyes. A long line of brown patches where she had killed the prime roots lay there, and she suddenly made a decision she figured she might regret. She began to run, slicing up the patches around one of the ones around her until she had cleared an area ten patches in radius. When she returned to the central patch, she found it clear of pollen, her filter no longer requiring as much qi to be maintained. She sat down in the lotus position at the center and began to cultivate.

The surrounding Wood Qi was thick, dense with the life taken and that being constantly produced from the patches in the distance. She began to study the pollen in the air and the patches within her view with her spiritual sense, taking in the Daos that seemed to be shimmering in the air.

For some reason, since the System arrived, the Dao always seemed to be within reach, something she had only ever experienced with Dao Treasures in her previous life. All it required for her to reach a state of enlightenment was to have something to focus on that resonated with a particular Dao… such as the dead and living devourer patches.

It was as if someone was trying to turn Earth into a gigantic Dao Treasure… a feat that no Immortal she knew of was capable of achieving.

As she meditated on the field of devourer patches, she saw again and again how small animals and insects were absorbed by the field, feeding the plants, increasing the amount of qi and its quality within each one as time passed. She saw within them something vital, a peek into the cycle of life that was…

You have achieved least enlightenment in the Dao of Nature, a branch of the Dao of Wood. You have been granted one Small Boon as a reward for your feat.

You possess three Small Boons. Do you wish to combine them into a single Large Boon?

She immediately agreed. She intuitively understood that the more of those Large Boons she had, the more she would benefit when she needed something from the System. Without a clan or a sect to support her, she would need every benefit she could get her hands on.

She continued to meditate for a time, solidifying her grasp on that little bit of the Dao she now understood, even as the qi she absorbed created the beginnings of a Wood pillar within her dantian, balancing out the Yin of the Ice somewhat. She felt her cultivation stabilize, the scales no longer tipped in one direction.

She rose to her feet and began hunting the devourer patches, collecting Wood crystals and bits and pieces of various component plants, determined to get as much out of the Challenge as possible. When she finished the last patch, a new message popped into her mind.

Challenge: Survive the Devourer Patches- Completed. Calculating rewards…

Challenge Reward: You may receive one set of Druid’s Robes or a Basic Alchemist Set

Again, it wasn’t really a choice. She needed a cauldron more than anything else, as she now had a spatial ring full of potential alchemical ingredients. What she had gained from the devourer patch had no unique properties, but they were all dense with qi, which would make them perfect for making qi restoration and cultivation pills and powders.

The cauldron, made of heavy blue-gray metal, appeared in her arms a moment after she made her selection. It had four inwardly curved legs attached to the bottom, as well as a ladle and stirring spoons of various lengths. A mortar and pestle were inside when she lifted the lid. With these, she could practice basic alchemy, though she would need to use a neutral or Wood flame instead of the Fire one she used in her previous life.

This isn’t the time, but after I’ve finished the local Challenges and make my way back to civilization, I can begin making basic pills, She thought. Without world-specific recipes, she wouldn’t be able to make anything high-ranking, but Wood and neutral qi plants were plentiful in the area, from what she could sense. Most neutral qi spirit plants could be turned into cultivation powders or qi restoration pills, and Wood plants often made perfect ingredients for healing pills, pastes, and powders. There were likely toxic ones out there, but she knew the techniques for reading the properties of minor spirit plants by heart (since practically every cultivator had to know how to find and collect them).

She put the alchemy set away in her ring, wincing to find it close to full. So she removed her backpack and placed all the crystals and cores inside it back in the ring. She pulled the backpack back onto her shoulders and started walking toward the nearest concentration of Earth Qi.

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It was on the way to the nearest Earth Qi concentration that she felt a sudden difference in the air.

Data from initial Challenge completions gathered. Rating planetary combat capability based on average survivors… complete.

Average combat ability is F. Highest combat ability is D. Talent proportions are 53% Class and Level, 27% Skill-User, 18% Cultivator, and 1% Multi-talent.

Generating world-wide monster distribution… complete.

25 local solar cycles before Tutorial protection is removed.

Individual achievements being processed… complete.

You have successfully completed one F-rank Challenge and one E-rank Challenge. As the only individual to have completed an E-rank Challenge before Planetary combat rating was determined, you have been given a choice of rewards.

Reward: One Small Boon, an individualized piece of equipment, or teleportation to the nearest safe zone.

This was the first time she had been offered a choice that was really a choice. A part of her was screaming to collect more Boons, even if she didn’t know precisely what they were. However, an individualized piece of equipment was highly attractive.

Teleportation to a ‘safe zone’ held little in the way of attraction to her, as she could find her way to civilization without help, especially now that there was no need to hide her physical prowess.

As she thought, a giant wolf materialized out of nowhere, its gray fur bristling and its blue eyes glinting with bloodlust as it leaped at her. Almost absently, she unleashed a knife-hand that landed with a crunch in the creature’s trachea, causing it to collapse with a rasping yelp. She frowned as she looked down at her hand. Normally, she would have expected her knife-hand to act as a literal knife, easily parting skin, flesh and bone given the sheer difference between a Foundation Stage body and a mundane one.

The creature is reinforced? Did the ‘System’ forcefully bring it up to the equivalent of the Gathering Stage? That was concerning, as it had looked – both to her physical and spiritual senses – to be little different from a mortal wolf.

A moment later, it shimmered and dissolved into blue light, leaving behind a brown beast core the size of her little finger, even as she felt a surge of neutral qi plunge through her meridians, directly entering her dantian. With a chill, she used her spiritual senses to check her dantian, immediately cycling her qi to cleanse the taint of the System from it. Unlike the qi she received in battle before, this qi was somehow corrupted, most likely from whatever process the System used to create the wolf. It wasn’t much, but it would damage her cultivation if she didn’t cleanse it.

If a normal cultivator took this into their dantian, without knowledge of how untainted qi was meant to feel or look like… She shuddered to think of the end results. If she didn’t miss her guess, better than ninety percent would get stuck in Foundation, with the rest barely making it to Core Formation, their foundations too shaky to go much further, regardless of their affinity for the Dao and natural talent.

… it looks like I will need to take a more active role, lest cultivators find themselves the weakest of those on this world, She thought. It was immensely irritating, as she had no desire to be an instructor for people taking their first steps onto the Way. However, if she didn’t make the effort, there would be no one else to take up the other crafts necessary for a cultivator’s progression.

As she contemplated, more wolves began materializing around her, and she quickly struck down each with her jian before they could take stock of their surroundings. If the ‘System’ was spawning creatures like this, it was likely the cities were in serious trouble. From what she could tell, the creatures within the Challenges were more natural, spirit beasts and plants that would normally pop up on any world that had a high concentration of qi. However, the ones the System manifested out of nowhere were unnatural, tainted in a way that seemed designed to damage a cultivator’s potential if they weren’t careful.

The qi from these things is nasty… it’s going to take me too much time to cleanse it at this rate, She thought sourly as she severed the head of one wolf with her jian before ripping open the throat of another with her fingers, channeling sever through her nails.

After a half-dozen, she managed to sequester the qi that was being injected into her dantian, preventing it from joining the flow of her qi as she fought. When the last of the wolves fell, she sat down, meditating as she cycled in a particular way to process the qi, carefully cleansing it of the taint, wincing slightly at the spiritual ‘stench’ as it exited her cultivation system. If she was a deep Yin or Yang cultivator, she might have consumed it or burned it away, but she was aiming to balance her cultivation between the two major aspects of qi.

This… taint. It isn’t qi. It is some other energy… It’s closer to life energy than qi, but it has been corrupted, changed in a way that will damage cultivation if one isn’t careful, She thought. If the System was taking a portion of the creatures’ life energy as well as qi and granting it to her when she killed them, that made a great deal of sense. Only certain types of cultivators could thrive off of unpurified life energies from others, usually Blood or Death cultivators familiar with the Dao of Devouring. For most others, it would destabilize their cultivation or corrupt it in the long run. Even a cultivator who sought to pursue the great Dao of Life would not be able to take such energies in without harm.

Considering that most of the creatures she had killed so far dropped pure qi crystals of the type they used, as well as beast cores similar to those she was familiar with… it possibly wasn’t intentional or had another motivation than simply crippling cultivators.

She ran toward the Earth Challenge, encountering more of the strange beasts along the way, most of which she ignored. She began practicing a movement technique, the Five Heavenly Steps, as she did so, patiently repeating the qi patterns and movements mentioned in the remembered scripture.

She hadn’t made much progress when she came upon the Earth Challenge.

Challenge: Defeat the Earth Golems

There were seven giant humanoids with no heads made out of dirt and gravel walking around an area outlined in lifeless dirt in front of her. It was as if one had cut a portion of the forest out and replaced it with a piece of wasteland.

The golems were mostly composed of brown, sandy dirt and gravel, from what she could see. However, that wasn’t the problem… the problem was that they didn’t seem to have any vulnerabilities she could take advantage of.

These are moving by channeling qi from a core somewhere inside the body… I can make it out, but it is too deep to reach with my jian or martial arts techniques, She thought with some irritation. Her qi techniques were all incomplete, save the one that filtered air, which could only barely be considered a technique at all, since it had no related Dao concept.

She had a plan and a list of techniques to learn, but learning the techniques was a project of weeks, months, or even years in some cases. The internal techniques she used were all meant to strengthen the body or shield it from blows, so her offensive potential was fairly limited. She was dozens of times stronger than a human her size should have been, due to her cultivation, but that meant little when it came to dealing with creatures like this. The qi in them was about at the same density as a low Gathering cultivator, but since they didn’t have any vital points save the core, disabling them enough to reach it would be time-consuming at present.

The best option she had was to cut apart their limbs with the jian before digging the core out. However, given the way their qi extended into the ground at their feet, she would probably have to contend against their regeneration speed.

In her previous life, she would have simply burned them to nothingness, but the Ice and Wood qi she had within her were unsuited to destruction like that without a technique to apply them to. If she had some enlightenment for the Dao of Earth, she might have disrupted their control over their bodies, but even with the System’s accelerated enlightenment, it wouldn’t come without inspiration.

One thing she had noted – with some amusement – when she read wuxia and xianxia novels, was that people were somehow able to use elemental techniques without having at lest touched upon the truths of a related Dao. However, the idea was fundamentally ridiculous. It was only by having a connection to a Dao that one could make elemental qi one’s own. Affinities were affinities, guides to the Daos one could most easily access.

If she really, really wanted to, she could devote a few decades to grasping a Dao of Fire or Lightning, despite her disability. Until she did so, however, she would be unable to use true Fire or Lightning techniques (setting alchemical flames aside, since it was possible to make alchemical flames from any element that had a transformational aspect).

Most of the techniques she had planned were made up of neutral qi. This was especially true for her movement technique and body cultivation. Her movement technique, the Five Heavenly Steps, was made up of neutral qi, with the first step (the only one that could be utilized before the Core Formation Stage) allowing her to run through the air parallel to the ground. The second step would allow her to fly without an artifact, and the third step would let her compress space between steps. The fourth and fifth were impossible for her to understand at her current stage and connection to the greater Daos.

She also planned to master growth and healing Wood techniques, as well as Earth body reinforcement, and an Ice long-range attack technique in the near future. They were all simple techniques that could potentially be mastered to some degree in the Gathering stage, if one had touched upon the related Daos. However, Earth’s limitations prior to initialization had distanced the Dao to a degree that made her give up on mastering them until Foundation.

I would never have imagined that mastering mundane technology would so distance the Dao, but the higher the technological level of an area, the weaker the Dao was… She mused as she began the boring process of dismantling the slow-moving golems with her jian, channeling sever at the moment she struck, delving her mind deeply into the mysteries of the skill.

There is a Dao here… I can feel it…

She knew she should really be focusing on grasping the Dao that allowed the golems to move, but the more she used sever, the more fascinated she became with the complexity of the concepts within the skill. It was not a Dao she was familiar with, but it was distantly related to the Dao of the Spear she had mastered in her previous life. As such, she had a feeling she might one day grasp its mysteries, given time.

Her head began to ache as her Foundation Stage mind reached the limits of what it could handle, though her spirit was unmoved. Contemplating the Dao was done primarily with the spirit, but it also involved the mind and body to some extent. As a result, her attempt to grasp mysteries that her mind and body could not yet handle was harming both.

Esoteric and greater Daos are beyond what my body can withstand right now… I’ll need to wait for late Foundation before I can try to incorporate either into my cultivation, She thought with a wry smile.

It wasn’t easy, but she forced herself to contemplate Earth as she meditated atop a dismembered golem, her senses seeping deep into its being as it tried to put itself back together, even as she regularly severed the stubby regenerating limbs. The earth was slow to move, but when it did so it did with great force, relentless and remorseless as its most casual movements crushed ruined villages and cities.

The golem was an object of destruction, with no purpose other than to bring ruin to anything that came within range, and that was reflected in the Dao she felt from it. Almost half a day later, she felt her understanding click, as her forced state of enlightenment ended, her body slumping in exhaustion and her cultivation straining as it incorporated Earth into her dantian.

I need to stabilize my cultivation before I go after the Water Challenge, Mary thought.

She could feel that her qi was highly unstable at the moment, one of the hazards of being in the Foundation Stage. When one was building a foundation, it was all-too-easy to tip the balance and cause the whole thing to collapse.

She delved deep into her dantian, where she found herself standing in forest of ice and conifers, surrounded by an ocean of qi. The qi threatened to sweep away the soil beneath her feet, hungry to reduce it back to its component parts.

She clamped down her will, twisting Wood and Ice around one another while digging roots of both deep into the Earth around her, expanding the ‘land’ outward as she went. One by one, she increased the number of Ice and Wood trees, also forcing the land to expand… until the vortex ceased to consume the land, finding balance with the elemental force now within her dantian.

With a shaky sigh, she withdrew her will, returning to the material world.

While she was inside her dantian, the golems had begun to regenerate, but that was easy enough to fix. She had come to understand her skill somewhat better than before, so when she severed the limbs next, the golems remained limbless, unable to recall how they had made their limbs previously.

It was only scratching the surface of what the rune on her hand meant, but that was sufficient to advance the skill.

You have achieved lesser enlightenment in the Dao of the Land.

You have achieved lesser enlightenment in the Dao of the Forest.

You have achieved lesser enlightenment in the Dao of Growth.

Removing existing Daos, replacing with the lesser Dao of the Frozen Land.

Her expression froze as she was about to finish off the golems. She had felt the moment the System forced further enlightenment upon her, using the beginnings of understanding she had gotten from stabilizing her cultivation to fuse her existing separate Daos into a single higher-ranking Dao. She could feel her cultivation try to become unstable yet again, and she realized that this was probably intentional on the System’s part. It wanted her cultivation to destabilize, for whatever reason.

She finished the golems quickly, earning the message that the Challenge was over.

Challenge: Defeat the Earth Golems – Complete.

Challenge Reward: A set of Earthwalker’s Boots, One Small Boon, or a Basic Qi-gathering Array.

She quickly selected the array, earning a bundle of metal flags inscribed with runes, along with a jade slip that was probably the instruction manual. She tossed them into her ring before sitting down to concentrate on cycling her qi, using the qualities of the Heavenly Demon Scripture to enforce balance upon her cultivation base.

She delved into other parts of her meridians, finding places where the System had interfered with the flow of her qi using its ‘rewards’, forcing the foreign energy out, removing contaminants that had threatened to taint her cultivation. She would have to be prepared after every enlightenment for the System to try to break her cultivation, a fact that made her mouth flatten in a grim line.

Name: Mary (all surnames have been removed until Tutorial is complete)

Age: 19

Titles: First Gate-Opener, First Gatherer, First to Foundation

Boons/Rewards: Two Large

Potential: Cultivator, Skill-User

Cultivation: Foundation, Dao of the Frozen Land (Wood, Earth, Ice)

Skill Setup: Improved Sever [Empty] [Empty] [Empty] [Empty] [Empty]

She wasn’t a gamer, so she didn’t feel immense joy or fascination at the change in her status. Instead, she felt a headache come on from the intensity of the rage she felt at the way the System had interfered. She would still be able to include Water into her cultivation, but its interference had forced the concept she was building to come together earlier than she wanted.

If I ever have the chance, I will murder whoever created the System, She decided as her lips twisted in a bitter frown.

Most would have thought that her cultivation was fine, that it was balanced… but it wasn’t. The Dao the System had forced on her was incomplete. Without Water, it wouldn’t grow with her, and if she tried to proceed to Core Formation like this… her dantian would crack.

This wasn’t entirely the System’s fault. If she were a cultivator with no pre-existing knowledge, its ‘help’ would have been quite helpful indeed. Someone with no knowledge would have accepted things at face value and probably could have progressed past Core Formation just based on the Dao she now possessed, by understanding it more and more over time. However, what she was trying to create within her dantian was an ideal that aligned with her cultivation technique. Even a slight tipping of the balance, a small bit of doubt, would cause her to fail at a critical point.

And so she was enraged.

Unfortunately, her current body wasn’t suited to the hot rage she was familiar with from her previous life. Instead, her rage became as cold as ice, deadly and poisonous, insidious in how it threatened to unbalance her mind. She meditated, laying out the reasons the System might have done as it had, slowly easing her anger into a more subdued state.

She had very rarely had cause to become angry since being reborn as Mary. Irritation and annoyance she was familiar with. However, interference with her cultivation appeared to drive her crazy with anger.

That was the real reason why her cultivation had suddenly gone berserk. She had failed to account for her own sense of anger, as she hadn’t experienced it in this lifetime. While she had taken in a significant amount of Yang to balance her Yin, that didn’t change the fact that she was female, inherently having a tendency to lean toward Yin.

It made her anger colder, more ruthless than it would have been otherwise. In her past life, her temper would have passed as quickly as it came, but in this current life, she felt that she could remain angry forever without any effort to maintain her rage. That could lead to obsession, vindictiveness, and a general inability to control herself in the long run.

She would need to be careful, lest she lose sight of her path.

Once she could tell that her cultivation had stabilized, she began walking slowly toward the Water Challenges. Unlike the previous Challenges, she had a solid idea of what she wanted to draw from it. It was a Dao she had been building since before the System, the one that would have formed the base of her current Dao, had she managed to find it before the System interfered.

It had already been over a day and a half since the System arrived. Her body could keep moving for ten days or more without any need for sleep, but it still took a toll on her.

However, she had a feeling of urgency, that things would only get more difficult if she didn’t hurry up and take advantage of the opportunities in the area. The trees were changing in ways subtle and not so much so, the local animals becoming more ferocious versions of themselves as their bodies filled with the ample amounts of qi.

The native beasts avoided her like the plague, much like they did when she wasn’t hiding her qi before the System. The beasts the System birthed came straight at her too… and it was after she killed her hundredth ‘wolf’ that she got a message.

You have successfully defeated 100 System-created beasts in the space of a single planetary cycle. This earns you the Beast-Hunter Title, granting you +10% to all damage done to beast-type System creatures.

You are the first person on your world to earn the Beast-Hunter generic Title. You have earned one Small Boon.

She narrowed her eyes. As she had thought, the ‘boons’ were the System’s favorite rewards for things it considered achievements. Since so far most of her boons had come from completing things first, that meant there was only a limited supply of them outside of Challenges. She was unsure of how to use them or what she could use them on, but she resolved to horde them until she did know.

Other than the wolves, small creatures made out of some type of blue mucus, large black snakes, and rats with a body the size of a man’s thigh began to appear. The three similarities they all shared was that they were hyper-aggressive, dissolved into that corrupted energy when killed, and left behind a beast core.

Her pack was now stuffed full of beast cores, and she was anticipating using them in the creation of pills and powders after she finished a Water Challenge.

It was becoming clearer the difference between creatures in Challenges and those outside of it by the minute. Those within Challenges were both limited in numbers and ‘natural’ in a way the materialized beasts weren’t. With the Challenges, the System was utilizing life and matter that was already there, rapidly infusing it with qi so it could become an obstacle, and placing potential rewards for those who defeated them. With the materialized beasts, it was creating them out of nothing as an obstacle that would grant a given reward for each.

The native beasts killed the invaders aggressively, but the invaders didn’t attack the native beasts if not attacked first. She saw one buck, who had impaled a disappearing wolf on its horns, grow several feet taller and much more muscular after finishing it off. She theorized that native beasts, being more able to handle impurities - in fact thriving on them in many cases, using them to strengthen their cores – were benefiting most from the created beasts.

This further drove her to consider the possibility that the created beasts existed to strengthen the native beast population, rather than the humans, even if humans could benefit from killing them. Cleansing herself of the foreign energy had become second nature over the last half-day, and she stopped for the night just outside of visible range of the lake.

She sat down to process what she had gained from cleansing the strange energy, further compressing it, folding it over and over until its density matched that of her own high-purity qi, then adding it to her cycling. Once she was done processing her gains, she began practicing her Ice attack technique, forming pebbles of Ice above her hand again and again.

Gradually, the ice pebbles formed into long curved claws, their forms dissolving after a second or two, despite her efforts. However, she was patient. She needed this basic technique finished before she dared to try a Water Challenge. Ice wasn’t precisely a weakness for Water, but it was effective in the way she was intending to use it.

It took her well past noon the next day to be able to consistently form the claws within two seconds, and it was early evening when she was satisfied she would be able to use it in combat. The technique itself was simple, its power reliant on one’s understanding of Ice. It was a particularly good match for her chilling Dao, as the physical strike was followed by invasive Ice qi being injected into the target, much like the way the Maidens had used it.

The force of the initial blow was reliant on her proficiency with the technique, but the chilling, invasive effect was more dependent on her Dao. At the ‘lesser’ rank, she could probably depend on it being effective on anything below her stage.

This was something she didn’t have experience with in her previous life. Her clan, for all their faults, had never provided her with any technique that was less than royal quality (meaning it could still be effective up to the eighth – the Monarch – stage. The reason she was making do with lesser techniques was because utilizing excessively high quality techniques would influence her cultivation, and she didn’t want to start using royal or imperial quality techniques until she hit Core Formation, when such influences would be reduced by having completed her foundation. In her previous life, she had found it difficult to understand Daos that weren’t related to the techniques that were given to her early on, making her cultivation less flexible than it might have been otherwise. While an understanding of many Daos wasn’t really necessary if your path didn’t call for it, such techniques – when learned too early – could drown out enlightenment as to other aspects of the Dao you studied.

For a clan that simply wanted a young protector who would stall at the Monarch stage, this was more than sufficient. Without fears that he would become an Immortal and leave the clan, they could use him for centuries or millennia without the need to spend expensive resources on raising someone else up to the same stage. Her clan had wanted to preserve its status, rather than expand its power, so this strategy made a great deal of sense.

She just hoped the System wouldn’t derail her plans further.

The next day, when she was sure she had the technique down, she passed through the last stretch of woods, finding the lake. As she had suspected, she could see that the lakeside construction was giving off black smoke slowly, most likely having been hit the previous day or the one before that.

The Challenge, which was thankfully on land, was visible from her position just inside the treeline. Three Water Nymphs, each of them radiating high Gathering Stage levels of Water Qi, were positioned facing outward from the lake, their beautiful faces placid, but their auras giving off a faint sense of hunger and bloodlust that was telling to her enhanced senses.

Water Nymphs were similar to the Ice Maidens in that they were formed from deceased women, though in this case the process was more extended and they had no ability to change others into their own kind. This was probably why there weren’t more of them, and why the half-eaten corpses of tourists were strewn across the area around the pier behind them.

Water Nymphs were born from the bodies of young women drowned while still alive by their lovers. Unlike Ice Maidens, they retained no memories or resentment from their previous lives, instead becoming one with the will of whatever body of water they drowned in. However, they were voraciously predatory and hungry, and their numbers could only be increased by mating with men from the land. It was quite normal for Water Nymphs to entice men to get into the water with them, mating with them then drowning them after, eating them while their flesh was still fresh. They frequently allied with kelpies and other water-born predators that preferred man-flesh, using them as protectors in exchange for their healing magic and ability to purify water tainted by mankind’s excesses.

Since their bodies were flesh, albeit flesh remade to thrive within bodies of water, they would be vulnerable to her jian and the physical aspect of the Ice Claws. That made matters simpler than dealing with an elemental, such as an undine.

Moreover, the Daos they were closest to were the life-giving aspect of Water, despite their predatory nature. That would make it easier for her to gain access to the lesser Dao she would need to truly complete her primary one.

What she really wished for was a Dao Treasure that could give her a better direction, but it would be decades or centuries before Dao Treasures began to appear naturally in the environment.

Forcefully learning Daos from enemies in battle was quick, relatively speaking, but the price for it was that she would need to gain further inspirations in other ways to build them up to the levels she needed.

This felt a great deal like learning a Dao from a training regime rather than naturally… but she had no choice but to take advantage of what the System offered if she wanted to survive.

She sighed, shaking her head slightly as she put those thoughts aside. Her cultivator’s instincts made her see everything the System did as suspect, and it was making her increasingly paranoid about the Daos she was picking up so easily.

Normally, cultivation was an intimately personal, selfish path that was all about personal enlightenment and power. Building power as a cultivator was meant to be a struggle against the chains the heavens placed on all at birth. However, it was as if the System had ripped apart heaven’s chains and replaced them with its own.

Once again, she dismissed her doubts and drew her jian with her right hand, an icy mist forming around the left. She used the the first step of her movement technique to run silently on air toward the nymphs, using Ice Claws to rip open the throat of the first Nymph, even as the System’s message entered her mind.

Challenge: Defeat the Water Nymphs

Even as the Nymph attempted to use its Water Qi to stem the flow of its purple blood from its throat, Ice began to freeze her flesh from where the claws had torn through. It spread out first as a patchwork of chillblains, followed by solid ice manifesting on the surface of the skin. The human-like creature began to struggle, scratching with suddenly-lengthened claws to try to tear the ice from her Dao free, but unable to understand the truths that were killing her.

All the time, Mary kept her spiritual senses active, sensing how the Nymph tried to heal herself with her qi, how the Water flowed within her and her increasingly enraged sisters. A blade of water came at her eyes, but she easily ducked beneath, slamming the heel of her right foot into the solar plexus of the Nymph who launched it, deliberately avoiding a fatal wound as Mary cut open her belly with the Icy Claws.

Seeing the process of Water trying to fight off Ice, even as Ice devoured Water, making it a part of itself, was bringing her precisely the enlightenment she was aiming for. Not wanting to bother with protecting herself from a third opponent, she quickly rushed the last Nymph and removed its head after avoiding an attempt to gut her with its set of needle-sharp claws.

For a time, she went on the defensive, deflecting, disrupting, and generally annoying the hell out of the one Nymph still able to move, even as the other one’s body was destroyed by her Ice Qi. The one she was fighting was having an easier time of handling the invasive qi, probably because Mary had avoided a fatal blow. However, it was gradually making its way into her internal organs, which were simpler and sturdier than those of a human.

The motions of her Water Qi as she tried to heal herself and fight off the Ice’s influence drew her in… and then it clicked into place. She deflected one last attempt to rip her open with a sword of water, then thrust her jian through the Nymph’s flat blue eye, punching through her brain and out the back of her skull. She then kicked the Nymph in the chest, ripping her sword free in a spray of purple as the creature fell backwards.

A few moments later, the last Nymph went still, and she got her expected message from the System.

You have achieved least enlightenment in the Dao of Flowing Life, a sub-Dao of Water.

She immediately sat on the bloodied ground and delved into her dantian, where she stood upon the land of frozen trees she had created. She imagined the newborn Water within her qi flowing toward the lands.

Streams of Water split the Earth in all directions, its Life-giving power causing the trees to bloom, the Wood sprouting green leaves, while the Ice sprouted complex flowers of snow and Ice.

It wasn’t perfect, but she would be able to gradually move it to where she wanted. She remained in her meditative state for several hours as she cultivated, drawing in as much Water Qi from the environment as she could. Water, while technically heavy on Yin, also had strong Yang aspects, and as such, in combination with Earth, it would stabilize her foundation as she built it. Ice and Wood would feed on the Water and Earth, growing tall, the roots digging deep.

She pulled out a third of her store of Earth Crystals, fifty or so from the false wolves, and she shattered them, releasing a massive concentration of Earth Qi that she combined with Water as they flowed into her dantian and cycled though her meridians.

The power given off by her as she stabilized her cultivation caused the local, newborn beasts to shudder away from her, while a few looked on with fascination as she aligned herself with the Dao she was building upon. Another hour passed before the Earth Qi was consumed, and she opened her eyes with a smile of satisfaction, her cultivation now even more stable than it was when the System arrived.

She picked up her bloodied jian and cleaned it on an unstained patch of grass, using sever on her fingers to cut open the Nymphs and retrieve their cores, tossing them into her ring. She also retrieved three deep blue crystals full of dense Water Qi, tossing them in as well.

She then brought her attention to her rewards.

Challenge: Defeat the Water Nymphs – Complete

Challenge Reward: One basic skill or Boots of Water-Walking

She selected the skill, simply because she didn’t need the boots. Once she fully mastered the first step of her movement technique, she would be able to walk across water without trouble.

Analysis Skill obtained.

Her right eye burned with pain for a moment, as an incredibly complex rune was inscribed within the iris. She blinked, her eye catching on the corpse of one of the Nymphs.

Water Nymph- A creature created by the sudden surge of qi during System Initialization and enslaved for use in a Challenge. Deceased. No level potential. Gathering Stage cultivation. No skill present.

This will be useful, She concluded. The information the skill granted her appeared to come from the System, but the insight it provided was valuable, nonetheless.

The rune gave off a feeling of hidden knowledge, in opposition to the sharpness and absolute rejection she felt from the sever rune. It wasn’t as deep as the sever rune, and she believed the insights within would be far less in the long run, meaning it had less room for improvement.

Now that I have two to compare… skills aren’t really connected to the Daos, though they are similar, She thought. It was as if someone had created an artificial version of the Dao, infused it with equivalent levels of power, then bestowed a part of it upon her.

Any inspiration she might gain for the Dao from the runes would be like having read a manual on something written in perfectly logical language, with mechanical precision, but it would not provide true insight, only a direction she might potentially take.

Still, she had no reason not to pursue the power improving her skills might give her. Cultivation’s greatest disadvantage versus the other two types of power, from what she could guess based on the clues she had at hand, was that it was slower and required more outside resources. A portion of the energies gained when she killed the twisted beasts was sent to the rune on her right hand, meaning that skills were also strengthened to some extent by killing, as she thought levels would be.

Skills would give her a leg up, letting her fight enemies who progressed past her due to the advantages of leveling. While she was at Foundation, she was not so arrogant that she didn’t anticipate being surpassed in the days to come. Core Formation and Nascent Soul were a great distance away from her, at present, even if she now had the basics of the Dao that would one day provide roots for her cultivation.

She would have to examine someone leveling up with her spiritual senses to be sure about her hypothesis though… and since there didn’t seem to be any survivors in the area other than her, she needed to get to Sandy Wells as soon as possible. While she could still benefit from hunting the local Challenges, the lack of information on the area outside the state park would likely harm her later.

She turned in the direction of town and began to run, practicing her movement technique along the way.

__________________________________________________________

As she had feared, Sandy Wells was suffering, though not as bad as the people in the park. Parts of town were burning, and screams of fear were echoing through the streets as she finally made it, just around dark.

The smell of burning flesh and rot was prevalent as she made her way through the streets toward the nearest familiar landmark, the town’s gym. Occasional gunshots could be heard, as well as clashes of metal against metal.

She made her way around a corner and came to a stop, seeing five creatures that looked like walking humanoid pigs with green skin, each carrying a club or a cleaver-like sword. Save for a loincloth, they were nude, and their eyes were bloodshot with hunger as they fed on the mutilated body of an unfortunate young woman who was caught out in the street.

Mary made her decision in an instant, and she was soon running on air, skipping past one of the creatures on the outside, her jian sweeping through its spine, enhanced with sever. It slumped to its knees, its face full of confusion as its entire body went limp and blood sprayed out the back of its neck.

The others roared, but an Icy Claw ripped open a second creature’s throat, followed by a jian through the eye of a third before they could ready themselves. Mary’s expression was grim, her eyes cold as she evaded the clumsy but surprisingly fast swings of the creatures’ massive weapons, calculating just how dangerous they were.

The energies that flowed into her were that same tainted energy from the wolves, so she was careful to sequester it as she fought.

For around thirty seconds, until she was sure she had a grasp on their capabilities, she evaded and dodged the creature’s attacks. Once she was sure she fully understood their potential, she quickly severed their heads, using her movement technique and sever to move and strike at a speed that was beyond their ability to see.

The raw energy is about five times that of a single wolf per creature. However, these creatures are only really dangerous if you don’t have a weapon that can pierce their skin. While they are faster than they look, a decently athletic individual could evade their strikes easily if they kept their cool. The wolves would be more dangerous to most people, She concluded as she entered the gym, noting that it was full of smaller creatures, also humanoid.

The creatures in this case were dark green-skinned beings roughly the size of a nine-year old boy with long sharp noses, long pointed ears, and fang-filled mouths. Most carried daggers or spears, and they were universally (and disgustingly) nude.

The scattered remains of a dozen humans – mostly just bloodied and cracked bones – lay scattered across the floor, and she quickly decided it wouldn’t be worth it to test their abilities. She was still processing the energy from the brutes out front.

She looked for a good place to rest and cleanse herself of the taint, and decided to take to the gym’s rooftop, using her movement technique to let her jump on air to reach it easily. The technique was coming more easily now that she had been seriously practicing and using it in battle, the System apparently aiding her understanding.

She sat down on the roof and began meditating, taking about fifteen minutes to remove the last of the taint and expel it before getting up to stretch, looking over the town for signs of resistance.

Her vision was at least as good as an eagle’s at a distance, so she had no problem viewing the area around her. There were several constructions giving off a green glow, their entrances greatly changed from when she was previously in town. Gray stone walls had mysteriously appeared around the Crimson Panther Inn, and the courthouse had become a fortress, with police officers armed with crossbows and rifles in the crenelations.

Hordes of the little green creatures were assaulting both, but the defenders seemed to be having few problems holding them off. They seemed to die easily, so she decided that wasn’t worth her attention for the moment. She saw a few of the civilian defenders throwing what looked like Fire-based techniques at the creatures, and she figured they had to have levels or skills, not cultivation. No cultivator would be able to wield Fire like that until the Foundation Stage.

She shifted her gaze to the creatures she had killed and used analysis.

Level 3 Orc- Orcs are a common System summon sent to newly initialized worlds. Capable of reproducing with any humanoid female, they are pests that are despised on most worlds, save that their meat is extremely delicious and slow to rot. They are incapable of cultivation, but a small minority become capable of gaining and using skills or magic.

Unlike the wolves, they hadn’t vanished, and she didn’t sense a beast core within them. If the meat was the reward for defeating them, that made sense… but she didn’t have room for it in her ring. The alchemical ingredients, beast cores, and elemental crystals were far more valuable to her.

She sat there, considering for a few minutes, then leaped down and began butchering the creatures, guessing that the ribs and belly would have the tastiest parts. She used her control over Water to force the remaining blood out of one of one orc’s body, then sliced open the belly and along the ribs with her survival knife. She carefully cut free cuts that looked a lot like pork belly, as well as a large swathe of rib meat, then wrapped them in an old but clean cloth before placing them in the last open spot in her pack. Her ring and pack were now completely full, to her annoyance.

She would need to use some of the crystals to cultivate in the near future, or she would be forced to toss some of her loot for better stuff if she found it later.

She decided to get back to the rooftops, staying up high as long as possible while she headed for the Crimson Panther. The courthouse was also an option, but it was too likely someone who thought they had authority would try to force her to stay if she went there.

She analyzed one of the little green creatures in the streets, out of curiosity.

Lvl 1 Goblin Fighter- Goblins are also known as the ‘Cockroaches of the Cosmos’, summoned to every known world to have been initialized into the System, hundreds have been lost to infestations of the creatures due to their ability to rapidly proliferate and evolve if left to their own devices. They can use females of any and all species (humanoid or not) for procreation and always breed true, though odd evolutions can occur based on the mother. Like orcs and many other System-summoned creatures, they are incapable of cultivation and cannot utilize skills (exceptions exist among evolved types). They are not just despised for their endless numbers but also for the uselessness of their corpses, good only for fertilizer due to the diseases and parasites they carry.

She made a moue of distaste, wanting to erase the creatures from existence at that moment, but that could wait, for now. Two creatures in a row that could use human women for procreation… the System was just being nasty now.

As she ran across the rooftops, occasionally utilizing her movement technique to cross between buildings, she finally came within a block of the Crimson Panther.

She then sat down atop the roof that she had landed on and began using her spiritual senses to get an idea of what was going on.

The goblins were like walking smears of tainted impurity, their very existence assaulting her spiritual senses with their pure malice and corrupted qi. The defenders of the hotel were different. Those with skills were visible by the concentrations of qi on specific points of their body, where their runes had formed. The few cultivators were less visible, as most seemed to be suffering from nausea and headaches due to the corrupted energies the System forced into their body when they killed the goblins.

The Classers were odd to her senses. It was like someone had printed a massive of numbers into their flesh that somehow created meaning. It reminded her of the computer programming class her mother forced her to take in high school, the cold soulless way whatever power the System had granted them was imbued into their flesh.

Whenever they killed an enemy, the patterns overlaid upon them filtered out the corruption, while transforming the qi into a particular shape as it entered a dantian-like core in their hearts. This shape was probably their ‘Class’, while the intensity of the overlay was the levels.

She analyzed a few of the Classers to get an idea of the correlation between what her spiritual senses were telling her and what the System called them.

Lvl 5 Warrior

Lvl 8 Assassin

Lvl 3 Brute

Lvl 10 Captain

Lvl 12 Pyromancer

Lvl 5 Hitman

Lvl 2 Cleric

The variance in levels was interesting. She could sense the dark karma tainting the spirits of the Assassin, the Brute, and the Hitman, while a wildness blazed from the aura of the Pyromancer. The Cleric gave off the impression of solemn compassion, whereas the Captain and the Warrior both gave off a grim determination and desire to protect.

The reason for the Pyromancer’s advanced level was rather obvious, as she was constantly tossing glass beakers of oil on the crowd before sending out waves and balls of Fire, devoid of Daos or any understanding of the flame. The Captain apparently gained power whenever someone under his command defeated an enemy. The Brute was quite good at squashing individual enemies and taking blows, but he seemed incapable of fighting more than one at a time.

The Assassin was using a weighted chain to smash skulls and throw goblins around, while the hitman used a rapier and crossbow to kill enemies in a quick and efficient manner. The Warrior wielded spear and shield to defend his allies, while taking any opportunity presented to deliver wounds, thus gaining power whenever someone struck down one of the goblins he wounded.

The Cleric was focused on healing, casting out blue wisps that sealed wounds and caused bruises to fade on her allies. She gained a small trickle of power from goblins killed by those she healed, but it really was only a small portion.

The Pyromancer was a young woman in crimson lolita dress, her pink-streaked purple hair done up in a bun. Her black-painted lips were turned up in a smile that revealed perfect white teeth, and flames burned in her unnaturally crimson eyes.

The Assassin was a dead-eyed man in his early thirties, dressed in leather armor that glimmered with qi, probably a reward from a Challenge or Title achievement.

The Captain was a grizzled muscle-bound African-American man in his fifties, gray peppering his hair and his brown eyes fierce and determined. By the scars on his hands, he was probably a veteran of some sort.

The Cleric was a pretty Latina girl in a nun’s outfit with a gentle cast to her face belied by the zealous joy in her eyes.

The Hitman was another man in his fifties, his eyes as dead and cold as the Assassin. There was more refinement, more finesse to his movements, but spiritually they were like identical twins.

The Brute was bald white man in his thirties, bound in muscle, wearing a wife-beater and torn blue jeans stained in purple blood. He wielded an iron-bound club without even the least bit of finesse, even as wounds briefly appeared on his body, only to regenerate seconds later.

Last of all, the Warrior looked like a high-schooler, probably fifteen or sixteen. He was dressed in LARPer blue foam body armor that had obviously seen better days, the shoulder pads having been ripped off at some point. The shield he was using was pretty battered, but is spear shimmered with the same energies as the Assassin’s armor.

It seems the System is most focused on Classers, with Skill-Users coming second, then cultivators. I can see its threads around the cultivators too, but they are thinner, fainter… and it is easier to see the ones that are around me as well, She tried to push away the threads, but it wasn’t possible. They were too weak to effect her spirit, but as for her body and mind… she sighed, deciding to just live with it until her body and mind became strong enough to reject the System entirely.

The threads around the Classers were so thick that it was like they were connected to tubes from every pore of their skin from head to toe, whereas each Skill-User had the threads attached to specific points on their body that corresponded to where a skill rune might be placed.

Since it didn’t seem as if things would change anytime soon, she took a plain sheet of parchment that she had purchased long-ago on the off-chance she discovered someone capable of cultivating in Earth’s environment. She then removed an old-fashioned fountain pen, as well as her mortar and pestle. She dropped a wolf’s beast core into the mortar and pestle, along with the root of one of the plants she’d collected from the devourer patches. She then crushed them together along with a few drops of her blood, smashing them together until they formed a black paste. She tossed the paste into her new alchemical cauldron, placing her hands on two points, spaced evenly to either side of the cauldron.

She then infused it with neutral qi while surrounding it with a Water alchemical flame. Gradually, over the course of a half-hour, the mixture became a viscious liquid, which she used to fill the fountain pen before emptying the rest into a plastic water bottle and tossing it into her ring.

Title Gained: Amateur Alchemist – all alchemical creations will be 4% more stable

Title Gained: First Alchemist – A text of alchemical recipes relevant to the title-bearer’s home planet.

A thick vellum text dropped into her lap, but she just set it aside, annoyed the System had interrupted her.

She then began to write a diagram, her strokes perfect as she infused the ink and the parchment with qi and her knowledge of the technique she wanted to impart, pushing the truths she knew into the once-living flesh of the parchment through the medium of the alchemically-made ink.

When she was done, she let out a deep breath, then set the parchment aside for a moment before once again taking out a half-dozen leaves from her storage, cleansing her alchemical equipment with Water and Fire before beginning the process of concocting once again. This time, she placed two types of leaves – a blue one with purple veins, and a red one with green veins – into the cauldron with a single quart of pure water manifested using her qi. She then utilized a pure qi alchemical flame, patiently refining the two ingredients inside the water for almost two hours, until it had been boiled down to a thick liquid at the bottom of the cauldron, whereupon she tossed in the other three leaves and used the mixture already inside along with her alchemical flame to refine and combine them together.

Late that night, it boiled down to a blue paste, which she spread over the surface of the parchment, pressing down upon the paste and parchment as the paste turned transparent, the parchment taking on a hard, glassy appearance. When she lifted it, it was as hard as rock and a little warm from the process, showing a perfectly-preserved diagram of the technique she wanted to pass on, that would let any cultivator cleanse the taint from the kill energy.

Title Gained: First Preserver of Knowledge – A single Large Boon.

She smiled slightly. Another boon… hopefully she was right, and that would be useful.

On her previous world, a similar method was used to preserve knowledge when jade chits were not available, as the treatment prevented degradation through exposure to the elements or careless handling.

Now all she had to do was convince the cultivators inside to use the knowledge she wanted to give, then pass it on to others. Giving the inherent nature of those with cultivating talent, she had few hopes they would, though.

_____________________________________________________________________________

She decided to make an entrance in a way that would catch attention from everyone inside the Crimson Panther. Cycling her qi, she leaped down from the roof of the building she had been sitting on, Icy Claws forming around both hands and both feet, as if she had become a beast herself. She didn’t bother drawing her jian. She didn’t need it for creatures like this.

She felt her lips draw back in a feral smile and she shot forward through the crowd of goblins between her and the nearest wall. She moved at a speed no conventional mortal would be able to see, her claws ripping through goblin after goblin as she danced amongst them, her movements bestial, vicious, and utterly merciless.

She didn’t bother with sever. She instinctively knew the skill would gain nothing from the low-level goblins. Instead, she simply ripped through them with raw strength and speed, blood spurting behind her, corpses becoming encased in ice as the effects of the least Dao of Chill folded into her personal Dao made themselves known.

She deliberately made a mess, gutting some, ripping off the heads of others, and plunging her claws through flesh and bone as if they weren’t even there. The part of her that had been holding back her entire life had come to the surface, and she knew that, for all the bindings of the System, she was free.

She left behind her a path of mutilated and frozen corpses, goblins scattering from her in absolute terror as they realized a brutal predator was amongst them. If it weren’t for the tiny amounts of tainted qi making their way into her meridians, she would have continued the slaughter forever, but she had already made her point with the goblins and defenders both, as she jumped over the wall, landing in a crouch briefly as she dismissed her technique, her booted feet and gloved hands going back to normal.

Not a drop of blood had made its way onto her jeans or jacket, and her eyes were glittering with good humor as she looked at the shocked faces of the Panther’s denizens.

“Hmm… was it a bit much?” She asked herself, tilting her head to the side quizzically. She didn’t realize it, but that was enough to make the Warrior and several of the other young men flush, though not the Assassin.

Mary left home as soon as she could, and she didn’t really socialize much in school, so she was unaware that she was extremely beautiful. Her cultivation had smoothed her skin to the point of perfection, perfectly realigning her features so they were the ideal of her genetic code, and there was a sense of vitality to her that made men full of desire.

Unfortunately for them, Mary just wasn’t interested, one way or another.

All cultivators became perfect examples of themselves when they reached Foundation, it was just the way things were. It never occurred to Mary to consider such issues, as she had yet to feel attracted to anyone since being reborn.

“Who are you, anyway?” The Pyromancer asked, her eyes wary now that she wasn’t burning large swathes of goblins. At some point she reached level 15.

“I was in the state park when the System hit, and I’ve been making my way back since,” Mary answered.

“What level are you?” The Warrior asked curiously.

“Cultivator/Skill-User hybrid,” Mary chose to answer honestly.

“Shit, that’s a thing? I thought the hybrids were all Classer/Skill-User combos,” The Warrior said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“I have something for your cultivators that will handle that little problem they are having,” She said, taking the diagram out of her ring.

“What’s that?” One of the cultivators, who looked like she was about to fall over form nausea, asked.

“Method to cleanse yourself of kill energy. It can also be used as a stopgap cultivation method if you don’t have a specific one yet,” She explained.

The cultivators’ eyes all gleamed, and they approached her eagerly while the others just looked on, seeming surprised at what was happening. The Hitman and Assassin were looking at the cultivators like they were something they wanted to toss in the garbage, while the Captain looked pleased for them, while being wary of Mary.

The cultivators huddled around the tablet while Mary approached the Captain, “I’m Mary, you are?”

“Laurence. I sort of stumbled into being the leader of this safe zone’s defenders,” The veteran said with a grimace.

“And I spent my first few days running Challenges while heading for town,” Mary said.

“Any survivors out there?” He asked quietly.

“None in the forest. Humans aren’t built for fighting the wolves the System summoned in, and if you aren’t prepared, most of the Challenges would be fatal,” She replied, shrugging with a wry look on her face.

“How did you get so powerful, so fast?” He asked curiously.

“Challenges are a cultivator’s bread and butter, whereas the regular monsters do better for Classers, from what I can see. Skill-Users can benefit either way,” She said carefully.

“I… see. That makes a great deal of sense. The cultivators started getting sick when they killed a dozen or so goblins. The Skill-Users don’t get sick, but they get strong slower than we do,” He remarked.

“How does that work, anyway?” She asked.

“Our stat sheets have levels, stat points, and Class-specific abilities. Each Class has its own stat distribution, with one or two free points we can distribute each level. The abilities basically define the Class’s fighting style. Robby over there,” He gestured at the Warrior, “Got Taunt first, followed by Flurry of Blows. I got Rally, followed by Commanding Presence. They use qi when we activate them, and there is a cool-down for each ability, though, unlike skills.”

“Skills become useless if the rune is depleted of qi, though,” She remarked.

“But they are individually more powerful than our abilities. Linda’s cut makes Randy’s Quickslash look slow and weak,” He said, shaking his head, “From what I can see, all three have their advantages and disadvantages.”

“I can see that,” She nodded thoughtfully as she observed the cultivators, who were in the lotus position, using the breathing patterns the diagram taught. They were easily cleansing their cultivation, and – interestingly enough – the taint seemed to take the impurities in their open meridians with it… though that made the stench far worse.

“Once they are done, I’m going to try the courthouse and see if they have any cultivators that need help,” She said.

“Why?” He answered inquisitively, his eyes wary.

“Things will get really bad if the cultivators are the only ones not getting stronger. Best to head that possibility off as quickly as I can, so I’m not left doing this alone,” She replied, shrugging.

That wasn’t the only reason she was doing it, going against her cultivator’s inherently selfish nature. Cultivators instinctively understood that debts had to be paid as their cultivation progressed, and that went double for help that let them progress faster or more safely. If those debts weren’t paid, it became difficult to form a strong foundation, and progression became slower and more bottlenecks formed over time.

Those debts would pay dividends later, when she needed their help.

They conversed in low tones as the Captain and his group rested, another team of fighters taking up their places on the wall. Most of their conversation was on little things she had noticed, which buildings were still inhabited, aspects of the System relevant to Classers, and which places were a complete write-off.

“It’s good to hear the courthouse and the Fryer Inn still have holdouts, but losing the entire area around the gym is bad. There was a pretty high concentration of people there, so the goblins will have leveled,” He said grimly.

“I could clean them out before heading to the courthouse…” She suggested reluctantly.

He shook his head, “No, we’ll need those higher-level goblins to level our Classers and strengthen the Skill-Users. I’m hoping to have everyone hit level 10 and get their third ability before we clean the goblins out completely.”

“Does it make that much of a difference?” She asked curiously.

“It makes all the difference. The level 10 abilities we got so far were all game-changers, such as my Rejuvenating Command or our Pyromancer’s Wave of Flames. With Rejuvenating Command, I can restore my people’s mental and physical energy without the need for food or rest, and Wave of Flames lets her attack across a wide area, utilizing any pre-existing heat sources to reduce her qi costs,” He explained.

“Hmm… just one thing. Cultivators will be slower to progress than the rest of you, but they won’t be as… limited. I will leave some of my discoveries behind later, to aid their progression,” She warned.

“So we can’t expect them to become strong as fast as Classers?” He asked, confirming.

“Some will progress more quickly than a Classer at first, others will go much more slowly. The first stage, the Gate Opening, will probably require a few months for most of them to complete, and I don’t have an understanding of equivalencies between cultivation and leveling. However, each Gate they open will make them significantly stronger. The strongest one here has six Gates open, and he is about as strong as you, maybe a little stronger,” She explained.

“Hmm… so each Gate is maybe worth two levels?” He asked hesitantly.

“Probably. The biggest difference will be seen when they open all their Gates and progress to the next stage, and I don’t know how that will translate to leveling,” She said with a helpless shrug.

His eyes narrowed, “And you are even farther along, I assume?”

She smiled faintly, “It’s better for both of us if I don’t answer that question, hmm?”

He shook his head slightly, “Alright. At the courthouse, tell them Sgt. Clemson says you are good people.”

“Laurence Clemson?” She asked.

“Yep, that’s my full name,” He confirmed. It was also confirmed he was a vet, since nothing about him screamed ‘cop’ to her.

“Also, tell them to stop wasting bullets. Firearms do almost nothing to the orcs or the gnolls,” He continued, “They need to use their Classers’ abilities more.”

“The monsters ignore physical rules that much? The orcs’ skin didn’t seem that tough…” She murmured, though in reality she understood why. The people on the wall subconsciously channeled qi through weapons in their hands, whereas bullets were merely metal driven by an explosive reaction. Since all of the ‘monsters’ had qi and reinforced their bodies with it (through whatever abilities the System provided), it was only natural that firearms would be near-useless. The tools the System gave as rewards were almost all made of bone (or at least partially so), probably because there hadn’t been enough time for local minerals to become fully infused with the new qi density.

It took almost four hours for all the cultivators to get a hang of the technique, and once they had, she retrieved the tablet, and she advised them on what to look out for in terms of dangers to their cultivation, including the necessity of being aware of the weight of obligation and debt. She also told them about the basic crafts needed for a cultivating community, so they would be aware and be able to make choices of their own if the System presented them.

When she moved out, it was already dark, and the waves of goblins had stopped, the creatures camping outside the walls, devouring their own dead.

The creatures didn’t seem to see her as she ran on the air over their heads in silence. Apparently, their night vision was even worse than that of humans.

She sighed with relief when she reached the nearest rooftop, then began making her way across town toward the courthouse.

Several times, she was forced to take a detour due to one of the buildings being on fire. It appeared the closer she got to the center of town, the worse the damage of the battles was.

The reason for this became evident when she saw a four meter tall humanoid with yellow skin and a bone club smashing in the front of an apartment complex, trying to get to the people inside, who were screaming loudly with every thudding blow.

Lvl 25 Lesser Giant- Giants are the offspring of Titans with lesser races, who were cursed by a god early on after their creation to stupidity. As a result, most worlds have cleansed themselves of the destructive pests – whether System worlds or not – but they are frequently summoned to newly integrated worlds as a trial for Classers. They are solitary and antisocial, considering even their own kind to be food, except for mating season. As a result, their numbers rarely become a threat, but a single giant is more often than not capable of massacring entire population centers if allowed to level off of native denizens and lesser monsters. They evolve slowly, but each evolution brings greater size and power than other beings. Their corpses are valued for their tough skin and hard, dense bones, but their meat is foul and slightly toxic to most humanoids, making it unusable even for fertilizer.

To her, its power felt like it had just barely reached the Gathering Stage. However, its naturally strong body would make it a threat even to her, if she wasn’t careful. She had little doubt that sever would be effective, but her instincts warned her against using her Ice Claws against it. It likely had some kind of resistance against the cold and Ice that analysis hadn’t been able to tell her.

Considering, she decided to cripple it and let one of the Classers claim its power. The creature was useless to her, as cleansing its corrupted energies would consume only a little less of her qi than it would give her. She imagined that a Gate Opening cultivator would die if they somehow managed to kill it.

She ran on air toward the creature, making her way down until she was in range of its right Achilles tendon, using sever on her jian to let her easily pass it through skin and cartilage. Very little blood came out of the wound, but the creature collapsed to one knee, dropping its club as it roared. Unfortunately for it, a second slash ripped through the tendons in the back of its left knee, followed by a leap that let her precisely cut through several of the tendons and ligaments in its right shoulder.

It collapsed on its face, its rage growing even stronger as the insect poking it somehow managed to puncture its thick skin and bone. Her fourth and last strike repeated the same blow as the right shoulder on the left, and she quickly left it behind, uncaring of who would benefit from the bounty she left there.

She came across several more of the creatures, dealing with them in the same way each time. They were too stupid and too lumbering and slow to stop her from doing as she wished, so it was trivial to leave them crippled and ready for survivors to turn them into levels.

The giants only seem like a major threat because people aren’t united and ready for them. The orcs also seem frightening to the normal people here because they are big and carry big blades. However, the real threat is the goblins. Their numbers will bury humanity if they aren’t culled quickly, She thought grimly. There were literally tens of thousands of goblins in the streets, hungry and devouring anything they could get their hands on, including each other. Exterminating them would be trivial for her if it weren’t for the problem of the corrupted qi gained from killing them.

From what she could tell, Classers bypassed the limitations of not having a dantian or meridians by having the power they gained overlaid on their bodies and minds directly by the system. The fake dantian placed near their hearts was just a source of qi granted by the System, and their ‘abilities’ were probably placed inside there as well, given the density of the ‘scripts’ she could see around them.

Skill-Users functioned like each of their ‘slots’ was a smaller dantian, building up energy while reinforcing their body little by little. She guessed that the first goal any Skill-User should have was to gain a skill for each of their slots, so they could power up faster.

She was reluctant to go after skills just to fill her slots. While they were useful, they didn’t feel like they would work synergistically with her cultivation. She wasn’t getting stronger physically through her skills like pure Skill-Users were. The energy already infusing her body from her previous cultivation stages was simply too dense for the qi from the skills to be anything other than a drop in the bucket.

However, in terms of what skills might be able to do, she guessed that they had a potential that was far greater than a Classer’s levels in their own way. While they also shared Classers’ mechanical aspect, there seemed to be a lot more room for personal growth. Only time would tell, though.

She set out for her next destination, a determined look on her face.