This plot bunny got me in a choke hold. That said, I'm going to transition back to focusing on the next chapter of A Young Warg's Game of Thrones and will try to get it published before I leave town for the long weekend and Anime Matsuri. :)
Chapter 2
The instructions on how to meditate and focus both on myself and the F-grade Cultivation Manual were not complicated. The mental focus, or lack of focus, depending on how you viewed it, wasn’t all that complicated. The spreading of Cosmic Energy around my body and around my core was tricky to get a hang of, but echoes from my second life made it also feel familiar. There was no precise one-to-one precision to it, but I guess if I had to make a comparison it was like bowling and pool. The action was completely different but an understanding of motion and spin carried over in the comprehension of what was occurring.
Lily had led me to the small room I would be sleeping in and had shown me the steps. The breathwork and meditation was simplistic and I got the sense that she doubted I would make much progress, but I was happy to prove her wrong. I was able to draw in Cosmic Energy, circulate the foreign energy into my ‘pathways’ as she called it, and then expel it. The difference was that the input and output ratio was skewed. I drank in more energy than I gave out and the difference stayed within me and circulated.
As I went through this process, my focus was interrupted at times as I thought about my family. My father was Edwin Degurechaff, a second generation immigrant to America from Europe. He was a practicing dentist, so we were reasonably well off even before my insider knowledge of the success of tech companies. He was everything that I liked in a professional. Hard-working, punctual, and orderly. He loved my mother very much and the two worked together well.
Her name was Melissa and she was a bit different than my father. One would think that a pianist would also have an orderly mind, but she was anything but. Fortunately, she cared for her family so her ‘last minute family trips’ and other ill-planned events were benign in nature. She loved surprises and I did my best to pretend to enjoy them, so long as they did not actually take me out of town at a random time!
Julia was my sister and where I was skipping grades and attending university early, she was a diehard athlete. A basketball player who had outgrown me in height before her eleventh birthday was more than a little annoying. I wasn’t even short this time around!
Stupid orphanage.
As best as I could tell I was in the same body as my second life. Same blond hair, same facial structure, same nose, and blue eyes. The difference was that I was not malnourished or as addicted to coffee and lack of sleep on the frontlines as I had been in that life. I had grown in a stress-free home, loved, cherished, and was listened to.
Thinking about my family filled me worry and fury. I already hated Being X, but I wasn’t sure if he was even responsible this time. If he wasn’t, then my hatred would pass on over to the System. The very notion that our planet would be crunched together with other worlds and we would have to fight for survival in this bizarre circumstance made me want to rip something in two. That my parents and my sister might be even now dead or in dire straits filled me with dread.
Lily had been vague, but said that there would be many dangers for those who did not get chosen for the Tutorial. My concentration broke at the thought of something happening to them, but after a few moments of box breathing, I returned to my equilibrium.
Huh, did I just level up?
After checking my status, sure enough, I had. What was odd was that my Wisdom was already one point higher.
“Lily.”
The fairy popped into existence again.
“Why did my Wisdom go up when I leveled up. I still have my Free Points to assign.”
She looked rather surprised, but then smiled.
“You already leveled from cultivation? Well, look at you. So talented! You Humans aren’t very optimized. There is plenty of room for your stats to be refined. They won’t go up forever, but early on you’ll get some improvement just by doing things alongside where you assign your stat points.”
If that was the case, I had better get back to it. I dismissed the Guide and returned to my meditations. I didn’t end up leveling again before it was time to call it a day, but I did drink in more Cosmic Energy so I had to assume I had made some more progress to the next level.
The following day I was given a choice by Lily as to the mission difficulty I would be assigned.
“You can choose the difficulty of the task, the harder you pick, the better your rewards. Easy missions come with only a 5% mortality rate, while the Impossible tier is at 99%!”
I blinked. “Wait… even at a 5% mortality rate, that’s a lot of death. Based on your timeline we’ll be doing over twenty missions during the Tutorial.”
The fairy pulsated a few times. “Yeah, but if you are strong, you will survive. The System rewards people who push themselves. If you want to sit back and take it easy, you can, but you won’t ever get on the Ladder that way!”
“Ladder?”
“The top one hundred people on your planet for your race! The System will eventually display the top one hundred in three categories. Level, Wealth, and Dao. The powerhouses of your primitive version of humanity. If you aren’t at least on the Ladder, you aren’t important.”
I sense more than a little prejudice from this fairy. Best to ignore it, for now.
“The System Ladder is still being configured, but by the time the fourth month rolls around, you will see if you are worthy of anything.”
I don’t intend on throwing my life away, but glancing at my Titles, I realized I probably had an edge up on my competition. I also had worthwhile combat expertise and my progress seemed to have surprised the bigoted Guide.
I ended up choosing the Hard difficulty which nearly blinded me with her blinking excitement. I hoped I had not made a bad choice. The mortality rate was listed at sixty percent. Still, I had faced worse odds. It would also make sense if other people with combat skills chose harder difficulties. Lily said team sizes could be anywhere from five to a hundred in the Tutorial missions. My thinking was that the trained athletes, soldiers, and fit people might begin their journey on the Hard difficulty.
I spent some of my Nexus Coins to equip myself with some low quality F-grade leather armor. Casting spells didn’t require staffs or wands, so I also equipped myself with a sword again. There wasn’t any point in not having a backup weapon, especially considering I could run low on mana. Though I had learned that cultivation would allow faster mana regeneration. So equipped and ready for war, I felt the universe blink again.
***
Koha screamed in rage as he swung his axe at the six-legged scaly wolflike creature. He and fourteen others had been teleported. The mission was a nightmare. They had to survive for four hours while being hunted by three of these massive beasts. From the get-go, they had tried to fight, confident in their abilities. A fireball had caused one to yipe, but other than a scorch mark on the thick scales it had not done much at all.
Another man had jabbed at one with a spear and the wolf had just bitten the spear in two! After two of their number had died he called for them to split up in his native tongue. He doubted they all spoke his language, but they understood his intent.
The terrain was nearly as deadly as the creatures themselves. They were on a rocky hill that had a mixture of slope gradients. A false move could send you down a steep drop to your death, just as easily as being mauled by one of those giants.
His axe connected and the scale crunched inward, but it was not a killing blow. The creature opened its maw to bite when a fireball was sent straight down its gullet. The ball of superheated flames was smaller than the first one fired, but the reduced size allowed it into the mouth and explode upon the back of the creature’s mouth instead of on the better protected exterior.
The heat barely even singed Koha as the wolf recoiled away from him, tried to whimper, took a step, and then crumpled to the ground.
Chet tyet!
He was breathing hard and the young blond woman saluted him before running off. With a groan Koha got to his feet. He had been sprinting as fast as he could possibly run for the last twenty minutes. He heard a howl from the distance and smiled grimly. He could afford to take a breather. He chose to ascend at a more reasonable pace to a spot that gave him two avenues of retreat. This would allow him to see if one of the wolf monsters was coming his way.
His eyesight had improved since the Tutorial, but it wasn’t super-human. Still, he was able to look on as one of the wolves took out another person. It was a grisly sight, and he once again was thankful that the creature took time to eat the corpse before continuing its hunt.
He caught sight of the fireball woman running from another straight to a ravine. Koha called out a warning, but she didn’t alter her course. When she got to it, she began running parallel to the cliff’s edge. The wolf pounced and she rolled under it and launched her fireball. This time it wasn’t aimed at the wolf necessarily, but at the ground it sought to land on. Instead of finding the earth as it no doubt expected, it found an explosive blast aimed at pushing it over the ravine.
After twenty seconds, the girl cried out in English. He didn’t know enough to understand it properly, but she was cursing. Koha wasn’t a dim man; he understood that killing powerful creatures within the Tutorial gave you some of their Cosmic Energy. If she had seen the monster fall, but did not gain the experience, it must mean the beast was still alive even after falling what looked like at least fifty meters down.
Hopefully it cannot find a way back up. And that the last one does not find me before the time runs out!
***
“Lily! What the hell was that? Our attacks barely even fazed those things.”
I was pissed. I had nearly died on that ‘Hard’ mission, that was more like a damn Impossible mission to me! Sure, we had survived, at least some of us, but other than my fortunate fireball into an oversized mouth, there was no good way to actually damage those things.
“Only eight of you died! That’s only a little more than fifty percent!”
I grit my teeth. I did not like seeing comrades fall in battle. I did not like feeling helpless.
“And look, not only did you survive, you leveled up twice, and wow, look at that reward!”
[Tutorial Mission 2: Survival. Completed.]
Performance Evaluation: Excellent.
Nexus Coins: 600
Tutorial Title Bonus: Additional +2 to stats.
High Quality Beast Scale
Title Awarded: Flame Savior.
The new title wasn’t bad. It gave me +5 Luck and it also gave me +5% damage with flame-based attacks. I also noticed that my Endurance and Vitality had also both gone up by one for all the running around I had done on top of the additional +2 to all my stats my upgraded Tutorial title bonus was giving me.
Name: Tanya Degurechaff
Level 6
Class:
Race: [F] Human
Alignment [Earth] Human
Titles: Defier of Gods, Indecipherable Anomaly, The Eleventh Goddess, Devil of the Rhine, Chosen of the Skies, Flame Savior.
Strength: 14
Dexterity: 23
Endurance: 17
Vitality: 23
Intelligence: 30
Wisdom: 21
Luck: 21
Free Points: 0
Nexus Coins: 615
I noticed that the 5% bonus to my stats didn’t seem to apply on the Status screen unless it could add a whole number. I wasn’t sure if that was because the System liked whole numbers for display purposes and I still gained the benefit, or if I didn’t until I hit twenty in a stat and 5% allowed me to gain an additional point. Lily didn’t know either… some Guide.
She also wasn’t much help in what I was supposed to do with the High Quality Beast Scale. She said that once I had access to shops or someone bought one I could sell it. Or I could make a deal with a crafter who could forge something with it.
“Crafter? Is that also a class?”
“Yes, there are many crafter classes, though people will have to wait until level 25 to make use of them.”
“So I’m supposed to carry this thing around until then?”
She just nodded brightly. It wasn’t crazy heavy, as it wasn’t the creature’s entire skin. But not something I wanted to be weighed down by after I was done with the Tutorial. In between missions I’d keep it in my little bedroom assigned to me.
The rewards had been good, but I wasn’t ready to die for a few improvements and another title. Before I cultivated again I mingled around to see if I could find anyone I knew, but there were few people from Chicago and no sign of my family. The odds were dismally low, but I felt I had to try. About the only useful thing I learned was that most people referred to their Guides as pixies, not fairies. When I cultivated again, there was no level-up or stat increase that occurred before it was time for me to rest for the day.
The next day, I chose to go on a Normal difficulty mission instead. The difference was like night and day.
Or perhaps it is because I gained a new title bonus and levels? I killed the most of those giant hornets among all thirty participants. Some people were even struggling with them!
Fortunately, my flames and my quickened reaction time meant that not only had I managed to rack up the most kills and the corresponding Cosmic Energy that came with them, but I had also managed to keep everyone there alive. No new titles were waiting for me, but I did gain another level. There was a certain addictive quality to that.
Normally when you exercised, it would take weeks to see marked improvement. Here, a single difficult battle could drastically improve your natural abilities and power. It was going to be very difficult to resist trying anything harder than Normal. I wanted to avoid dying, but on the other hand, wouldn’t getting more power now mean I was less likely to die in the future?
That’s how they get you. But it doesn’t mean the thinking is wrong. If what Lily says about the System Ladder is right, only one person in every ten million would matter in the System's eyes. Dare I be this reckless in my caution?
***
After three days of missions, we had a full day dedicated to meditation and recuperation. I continued my journey of cultivation but also took some time to get to know some of my neighbors. It was with some surprise that I learned not everyone was having the exact same Tutorial experience. All of the pixies generally blathered on about the honor of being a Chosen, but how much information they shared from person to person varied a bit. Their personality was just a wee bit different too. Which I guess meant that pixies were a true separate race and not just some sort of construct the System created for this Tutorial.
After a whole day of cultivation, I went for another Hard mission. It was a brutal affair, but this time I had a great partner. A martial artist who seemed to be an ace at cultivation and fisticuffs, he proved extraordinarily skilled. His contribution was probably greater than mine, but I think I won out on Cosmic Energy increases thanks to my Fireball skill which was great to use against the hordes we fought. Once again, the rewards were amazing, but I also didn’t truly wish to risk my life in so many dangerous encounters every single day.
Plus there are other advantages of doing Normal missions.
I had obtained a Dynamic Quest after leading a bunch of other Tutorial participants.
Commander of Men (Unique): Have followers that recognize your leadership slay 10,000 dangerous foes. Reward: Title: Commander of Men (Upgradeable). Followers who recognize your leadership gain 2% to all stats under your direction. (102/10,000)
In my conversations with others, only one other person had a quest given to them and it was a Hornet Slayer quest that required her to kill the insectoid monsters and one Hornet Queen. She seemed a bit troubled as to ever being able to complete that quest. As for my quest… I didn’t particularly like it, but as someone specializing in sending fireballs at people, it would be a potentially useful buff for the meat shields in front of me. I had learned from Lily how to share screens from the System menu and I could use that as a way to get people to listen to my orders as well.
The quest was vague as to what counted as a ‘dangerous foe’ and what was necessary for followers who ‘recognize your leadership’ but basically it seemed to amount to was that the System detected if I was leading people and they were listening to me while they slew things that could hurt them. On Hard quests, it was quite difficult to do more than just survive, but on Normal quests I not only was often the most confident individual, I was able to ensure we stood our ground and slew our enemies instead of trying to run or hide.
The other exciting part of the title was that it said upgradeable. That meant the 2% bonus would almost certainly be raised in the future, which would allow me to be even more helpful to others. It also made me wonder if working on this quest would help unlock an uncommon or rare class.
Lily had explained that I would be able to choose from five different classes once I hit level 25. What classes I could get for someone so primitive ranged from Common, Uncommon, to Rare. The better I performed in the tutorial and what I physically did in the Tutorial would determine the kinds of classes as well as their rarity. Which led me to a more in-depth conversation with her about the crafting abilities she mentioned could be done with the High Quality Beast Scale.
“Wait, so your class determines how you gain experience? I thought we gained it through cultivation and absorbing Cosmic Energy from our kills.”
Lily’s body blinked from purple to green and then back to a myriad of colors.
“Everyone gains experience from killing things, but you can also gain experience by fulfilling the task of your class. If you are a scribe, that means writing things. But that method is often much slower, but safer. The System rewards boldness. You are a Chosen of Earth!”
“But if I were, say, a blacksmith or whatever, I could still gain experience by hunting monsters, yes?”
“Yes.” Lily looked to her left and right. “The System encourages boldness, but some powerhouses have come up from the crafting classes. If you make a lot of Nexus Coins you can buy Nexus Crystals and absorb them to gain large amounts of experience as well. I can’t advise you on what path to take, but you should have already noticed the experience curve. In time slaughtering very low level monsters gives you almost nothing at all. The same is true for crafters. Higher quality items need higher quality ingredients, if you want to be on the Ladder you would need to either partner with someone strong who can kill monsters, or risk fighting yourself to get those necessary materials. And as a crafter your skills won’t help you in battle!”
I wonder what incentives and compensation these pixies have. She’s very obviously trying to step around some guardrails on what she can say, but just as clearly seems to want to push me to a combat class.
In this new reality, where supremely dangerous creatures existed, I would really prefer to have a way to advance that did not constantly have me risk my life. The option of cultivation was always there, but it was far slower than killing things. In an attempt to perhaps influence the System, I took up some simple tasks while I cultivated. It lowered my cultivation a bit to shape wood with a knife, but only minimally so once it became routine.
Rewards for Hard quests were generous. My stats were increasing nicely from my title advancement and I had obtained two [Constitution Pills] that would help me on the journey to go from an F-grade Human to an E-grade Human.
I was shocked, but incredibly happy when Lily shared with me more about what that meant. Humans tended to only live to around a hundred. With the improved stats from leveling it would likely lead to our species breaking longevity records, but we could cap out before we reached our second century. Unless someone upgrades their Race-grade. Then… it should be simple to live to be over five hundred years old.
That appealed to me greatly. The biggest reason is I still had no clue about what Being X had done to me in regard to my reincarnations. He had threatened oblivion at the end of my first life if I did not turn to him in my second life. That didn’t happen, and here I was in my third life. The idea of being able to live for several lifespans was a boon, and Lily teased that, while she doubted I would ever reach such heights, D-grade Humans are able to live to thousands upon thousands of years.
If I assume she’s telling the truth… there’s another reason to do well in the Tutorial and get more of those pills as rewards.
Despite all that, I wasn’t going to risk ever trying the Impossible mission difficulty. It just wasn’t worth the hazard. After the Tutorial was done, Lily seemed to be implying that the world would be far more dangerous, and would continue to become more dangerous over time as the planet grew into its D-grade status. While probably not her goal, this told me that I would still have more opportunities in the future to gain more pills or other magical substances that could help me transform my Race-grade.
I felt far ahead of the curve. My neighbors around me were half of my level by the time we were done with the Tutorial. That sort of difference encouraged me to make my last three missions Hard difficulty. I nearly lost my life, but through some clever application of Fireball to knock down a building on a horde of pursuing skeletons I had survived. Level 23 was what I had reached and I felt overwhelmingly powerful compared to what I had been before the Tutorial.
I checked the Status screen and felt quite pleased at what I saw.
Name: Tanya Degurechaff
Level 23
Class:
Race: [F] Human
Alignment [Earth] Human
Titles: Defier of Gods, Indecipherable Anomaly, The Eleventh Goddess, Devil of the Rhine, Chosen of the Skies, Flame Savior, Adventurer, Giantsbane.
Strength: 28
Dexterity: 34
Endurance: 32
Vitality: 36
Intelligence: 60
Wisdom: 52
Luck: 32
Free Points: 0
Nexus Coins: 4,900
Items: Medium Quality F-grade Sword. Medium Quality F-grade Dagger x2. Medium Quality F-grade Leather Armor. Low Quality F-grade Spear. High Quality Beast Scale. Medium Quality Wyvern Teeth x6. Medium Quality Beast Fur x8. Healing Pill x2. Small Cosmos Sack. Dried victuals x5.
The voice of the System came on again and the universe blinked.