“System, upgrade my martial comprehension to a total of one billion credits.”
Purchase confirmed. Cost 990 million credits. 6,733,086,524 credits remaining.
This might not be enough to compete with the likes of YuLong and JiaQi, but with a King-level amount of credits boosting me, I was confident that I could quickly learn what I needed to as a Grandmaster.
Unfortunately, we had found that there wasn’t a good way for us to sign up for group combat training in Mortal City, and since we were all from different peaks, we could only sign up for individual lessons with someone who specialized in our specific elements.
The only problem with signing up for such lessons was that they required paying a large number of contribution points. While I could sell my spirit stones and high-level pills to earn some quick points, it was a bit risky to show off my possessions too much. We had found out that Ning ChenKun’s faction had all advanced to at least Yellow City, so there was no one I felt I could trust to handle things discreetly in Mortal City.
Instead, I turned to the Mission Hall for a reliable, safe source of income. I needed to complete dozens of missions to pay for just a single lesson, but my name and my reputation for high-quality formations were starting to spread. This was leading low-level city lords to put in high-paying special requests for my services.
These requests were all for custom formations with unique combinations of effects. Most formation specialists would turn them down instantly because of the complexity involved in designing and creating such unique formations. However, my analysis ability provided me with a bit of a cheat here.
It wouldn’t tell me what I should do or how to do it, but it did tell me if a formation was functional or not. After receiving each of these requests, I quickly iterated through several slapdash formations to find a design that worked properly. Then, I carefully carved a high-quality version of this known-good design into clean slabs of marble.
These requests paid far above what normal missions did, and they helped me accumulate enough points to afford my combat lessons. Once I accrued enough points, I headed to the Mission Hall of the Earth Peak to set something up.
To give myself the best shot at finding someone who knew what they were doing, I submitted a mission request for an inner sect Martial Lord. Hiring a Lord as a teacher was a bit expensive with my current point reserves, but it gave me the option of limiting the mission to only those who completed the Path of Body on their way to Yellow City. These weren’t necessarily the best fighters, they might have even been among the worst, but they were the ones who had proven they knew what it took to pass the test ahead of me.
The receptionist gave me the side-eye when she saw my request, likely because I wasn’t technically supposed to know about the Path of Body yet, but she processed it without comment. The existence of the paths might be a ‘secret’ from people in Mortal City, but it was a poorly guarded one at best.
---------------------------------------------------
I met my trainer at the base of the Earth Peak on a large open field of packed dirt. He was a large muscular man and wore a sleeveless hanfu to show off his arms.
I gave him a deep bow. “Lord Gong, thank you for taking the time to train me.”
He grunted and his face remained impassive.
“Let’s not waste any time on pleasantries. You’re paying to learn how to fight, so that is what we’ll do.”
He folded his arms across his chest and looked down at me.
“You’re lucky that I’m your teacher. Others will try to complicate things, but fighting as an earth cultivator is simple. There are only two things you need to know how to do.”
He slammed his left foot on the ground and a two-meter-tall spike of earth shot up beside him.
“The first is how to create an earth spike. Use your qi to gather the earth within an area and make it burst out. The most important question to keep in mind when using an earth spike is ‘Where is the earth coming from?’ To create the spike, you must pull the earth from somewhere.”
He slammed his right foot, and a large crevasse opened up beside him.
“The other thing you can do is move earth out of the way to create a hole. Use your qi to move the earth somewhere else. The most important thing to keep in mind when creating a hole is ‘Where is the earth going?’ You can’t create a hole without sending it somewhere.”
He unfolded his arms and took a fighting stance.
“That is all combat means as an earth cultivator. Pulling and pushing dirt where you want it to go. In the Scripture Pavilion, you can find countless combat techniques, but in the end, that’s what they all boil down to.”
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He slammed a fist into the ground.
Instead of buckling under the weight of his punch, the earth remained firm.
A meter in front of him, the ground cracked open, and a shard of sharp stone shot out at high speed.
“Concentrate the earth into a spike, open the ground, push the spike out. That’s all there is to it. If you begin thinking in terms of pulling and pushing earth, everything becomes a lot simpler, and you can focus on the fight instead of trying to use fancy techniques.”
Lord Gong didn’t seem like the type of person who enjoyed being asked questions, but I needed to learn, so I had to ask.
“Lord Gong, I previously learned a technique that focused on steadying my body and connecting it to the ground. This lets me punch harder without being pushed back from the recoil of the hit. It wasn’t about pushing our pulling earth, but it was an earth qi technique.”
His upper lip twitched in annoyance.
“There are techniques that use earth qi in somewhat different ways, but they are tricks that will only make you overthink things while fighting. I can’t say how this technique of yours works, and I don’t care. If you want to create a similar effect in a simpler way, just expand your qi through the ground and pull a large block of earth toward the soles of your feet.”
I watched in energy vision as he began demonstrating the idea so I could see it clearly.
“This can anchor you. It might not be as good as that technique of yours, but that technique sounds dumb anyway. There might be situations where you want to anchor yourself like that, but it’s not something that’s going to be so frequent you need to memorize a technique for it. Just learn to push and pull earth so you can fight instinctively without relying on such tricks.”
With his short lecture completed, Lord Gong was done talking. For him, there was nothing else to say. All it meant to fight as an earth cultivator was to learn to push and pull the earth instinctively, so there was no need for long speeches.
Moving on from the lecture portion of the lesson, Lord Gong took a stance and began attacking me.
He was relentless. I barely had any time to catch my breath.
Lord Gong burned through a lot of qi during these spars, but since he was a Lord, his reserves were far greater than my own. He used those reserves to spend several hours pummeling me.
At first, this style of training was brutal, but I quickly understood what he was doing. While fighting without set techniques consumed more qi than I was used to, he never spent more than the minimum amount of qi and stamina necessary in any one attack. And even though he was a harsh teacher, his punches were only strong enough to make his point. He wasn’t attacking to injure me.
With my incredibly high comprehension of martial arts and Lord Gong’s simplistic fighting style, my skills rapidly advanced. I didn’t need to learn anything complicated. I only needed to make pulling and pushing the earth more instinctive, and that was something my comprehension boost was incredibly effective at.
After one lesson, I felt that my skills had advanced rapidly, but I wasn’t satisfied. Through special requests, I scheduled three more training sessions, and after the final one, I felt I had nothing more to learn from the Lord.
There was no need for countless lessons. I needed to get in some real practice.
---------------------------------------------------
My classmates still needed more time before they would be ready to begin attempting combat missions with me, and I didn’t want to risk attempting my first one without them, so I shifted my focus to the Earth Peak Trials.
As a Grandmaster, I was allowed to gather enough essence to raise my affinity to peak five-star. Since I would be cultivating it to make my gains permanent, I would need to go deep into the Trial several times to reach this limit. The peak elders might not appreciate me using up the amount of essence this would require, but whoever was in charge of the thing had known what I would be doing when he asked me to join this peak.
Learning Lord Gong’s fighting techniques was only the first step in my preparation. My next step was dealing with my spirit fire.
One of the problems I had in the Master-level trials was running out of qi and needing to waste a significant amount of time cultivating to restore it. I could make better formations more quickly to assist with this now, but it still wasn’t a real solution. I needed to be using less energy, and one of the biggest drains on my qi reserves was pouring it into my spirit fire while fighting.
The Profound-Rank wood-element spirit fire was devastating against Master-level opponents, and I had no doubt that it would be equally effective against Grandmaster-level ones, but it was too qi-hungry. Instead, I needed to use a fire seed. A fire seed would draw in energy from the environment on its own and wouldn’t need me to provide it with all of its power.
I currently had the spatial seed sitting in the core of my soul, slowly working on expanding my storage space. It would be interesting to see how powerful its fire would be if used offensively, but doing so would be a bad idea. I didn’t have a high enough affinity to control it properly, and if the elder in charge of the Trial saw it, he might become greedy.
So, I mentally tugged and moved the seed into a jade box, storing it away.
That left me with two options, the Cold Mountain Fire and the Flowing Metal Fire. Neither was wood-based, which was unfortunate as that would have been the most effective against the stone golems. After examining both seeds, I was unsure if the Flowing Metal seed retained enough energy to burst through my soul and burn me alive, so to be on the safe side, I decided to use the Cold Mountain Fire since I was confident that it wouldn’t be able to harm me.
When moved into my soul, the seed took its place atop my storage space where the spatial seed had recently rested. It shouldn’t have any effect on the space, but at this point, I felt that this was the most natural position to keep it. As expected, it didn’t explode in a burst of pent-up energy. Instead, it began hungrily sucking in all the energy it could from the environment like a starving wolf.
Sitting in a Qi Gathering Formation, I fed the seed as much energy as it needed until it was satisfied and calmed down. Then, I began practicing using it in combat.
I didn’t only need to learn to instinctively push and pull the earth around me. I also needed to be able to instinctively pull flames from the seed and shoot them at my opponents in the form of fiery spears. For normal attacks, I would blast my opponents with beams of Cold Mountain Fire from my soul. With tougher enemies, I would use a needle of the wood-based spirit fire from my body.
I spent several days working to incorporate the different two spirit fires into my attack patterns, but it was impossible to reach the same level of instinctive action that I had gained through combat with Lord Gong. I needed an opponent to temper myself against.
I headed back to the Earth Peak Trial.