Depthless Hunger: A Progression LitRPG, page 35
"So if there's no path for someone like me, can we create a new one?"
She blinked at him several times, as if he'd suggested they punch a mountain. "Kai, I need you to understand something. Paths on Cloudspire aren't invented on a whim. All of the cultivation techniques I used were developed by entire sects over many generations. After a lifetime of work, a master might hope to add a few strokes to their techniques. No, we can't just create a new path."
But it seemed like that was the only option available to him. Kai wasn't even bothered by the fact. Ever since he'd begun to accept that his soul was apparently a freakish product of coincidences, he'd known that he'd need to move forward cautiously. The monstrous parts of his soul might offer potentially great power, but they weren't going to hand it to him. He'd need to work harder than ever before.
Of course, he couldn't have done that without Zae Zin Nim, so he needed to pay her back. He smiled even though he knew she wouldn't smile back and stood up. "Thank you for your assistance this far. Would you like to work on mana training now?"
"Yes. There is much work to be done."
Chapter 62: Qi to Mana
Zae Zin Nim did not like mana cultivation. She did not like it at all. She especially disliked the fact that she kept thinking about it as "mana cultivation" even though she should have known better.
In fact, mana was proving to be far from the inferior version of qi that she had always been taught. Approaching it calmly accomplished little and all her mental discipline needed to shift gears as if she was on a radically different path of cultivation. She gritted her teeth and tried to channel all of her frustration into enough raw emotion to stir her internal mana.
It was easy to slip into the wrong habits, because she actually could cultivate mana. It would never help her advance, and she knew it wouldn't awaken a Class either, but it felt surprisingly good. Her meridians, so strained and cracked, accepted the new energy despite herself. She needed to force away that soothing current and instead stoke a flame.
Everyone on Cloudspire had also been wrong about mana-users having no internal techniques. They were certainly more brutal, but calling them simplistic was like saying a perfectly executed palm strike was just slapping someone. Kai had actually been a bit frustrated at first as she tried to grasp the concepts.
Of course, she'd been able to master them in time, ahead of the schedule he set for normal hunters. No matter how strange this land was, she was still the woman who had been hailed as a genius so many times that her rivals had conspired to ruin her life forever.
Once she pushed her mind into the proper mental grooves, Zae Zin Nim didn't falter from them. The mental discipline required wasn't the same as the mind-consuming focus of meditation, so that meant her thoughts began to wander. Unfortunately, they wandered straight back to Kai.
She had tried to give him suitable encouragement without inflating his ego, but the truth was that his progress was intimidating. If she hadn't realized that mana users did develop strong mental discipline, she would have been terrified. Despite all his disadvantages, he threw himself into cultivation with a fervor she'd rarely seen before.
How strong would he have been if he'd grown up on Cloudspire? Strangely, she thought that he might have lost what made him remarkable. Cultivating here required clawing for the barest wisps of qi, which suited him perfectly. The life he'd lived involved running headlong into every obstacle and battering it down with his very essence.
What a contrast to the lazy cultivators she remembered surpassing! She remembered how they had whined and struggled when they were sent to practice in regions with diffuse qi, and that had been ten times as dense in as this environment.
The major problem might be his body, which was clearly shifting on a spiritual level. She had omitted some facts about that because she had no solutions and didn't see how the knowledge could help him. His body soaked up qi like rain on parched soil. Normally that wasn't supposed to happen until the Body Refinement stage, and she feared he would deviate painfully, but the qi didn't seem to be going to waste. There was a hunger deep within his soul, never satisfied...
Best not to think about that. Zae Zin Nim stood up and dusted off her robes, or the closest she could get to proper robes here.
"I would like to spar now," she said. Kai finished his current cycle and then leapt to his feet.
"Sure! I was thinking you might need some work."
They walked further from their camp and bowed to one another, though his bow was a strange imitation. Zae Zin Nim disliked it, but she had come to accept that mana could not be cultivated by meditation alone. She had been skeptical when Kai had said it required tension and danger, then slowly come around to his way of thinking.
Sparring with him wasn't exactly dangerous. Oh, he was reasonably skilled, definitely more than cultivators who relied on advancement to blow opponents away. He also had a vicious edge that occasionally came out when she landed blows, an animal ferocity controlled by human intellect.
But despite all the ways she had come to respect Kai, he was weak. Despite his willpower and skill, he had been born on a continent with barely any power. For the first time in her life, she thought about how truly unfair that was. The will of the heavens was ultimately senseless and cruel.
Midway through the sparring match, Zae Zin Nim felt something rupture inside her. Her condition had been improving, but the ragged scars within her could only hold together for so long. There was bile spilling out inside her, and unless she stopped immediately, she would suffer for it.
"Are you alr-"
She cut him off with a palm strike to his shoulder, sending him stumbling back. Though he looked concerned, he respected her enough to keep fighting. Zae Zin Nim pushed herself harder, seeking that edge of danger, feeling the mana surge around her as she forced out the last of her qi.
It ended with her stumbling to the ground and vomiting, of course. She was bleeding everywhere and her robes were soaked in a foul sweat. Part of her was furious that her condition had interrupted her sparring match, but she thought she had made the right choice despite the misery: her mana had responded to her last desperate attacks more than to hours of meditation.
"Are you alright?" Kai bent down beside her and she turned away from him. Thankfully he understood and backed away. "Well, I don't want you to hurt yourself, but you're adjusting to the mana exercises. Your cultivation techniques must work better for this than I thought, because you're making incredible progress. I'm sure by the time we find a sufficiently dense pool you'll be able to awaken a Class."
"And how-" She stopped to hack up what felt like internal organs. "-how will I know what will awaken?"
"That's the part that's up to fate, supposedly. Some think that it has something to do with your inner nature, and if that's true you don't have to worry. Everything about your soul is so orderly, I feel like your Class will have to fit in or it would be ashamed of itself."
Always such broad encouragement with a laugh. Zae Zin Nim was never sure if his words could be entirely in earnest. Not that he didn't express hard realities, but he seemed to want to make her feel better. It was simultaneously confounding and strangely warm.
"Please excuse me, I need to clean up." She staggered away from him toward the river. Water was becoming more frequent as they traveled further south, so she was easily able to find a bend in the river that was blocked by rocks so that he couldn't see her.
Ordinarily, she would never have bathed alone while traveling with a man, since she knew exactly how that would end. After so long together, she was beginning to accept that Kai truly wouldn't do such a thing, or even try to peek at her. Not because he thought of himself as honorable, but because it didn't occur to him to do so.
As she reached the edge of the water, Zae Zin Nim caught a glimpse of her face in the water and choked back a sob. Always so arrogant and thoughtless. Even if he had been a worse man, why would he follow her? She was a bleeding wreck, her former beauty a ruin of scars and oozing bile. Even the smugglers had been too repulsed to try to touch her.
Cleanliness long forgotten, Zae Zin Nim fell to the side of the river and wept.
Chapter 63: Three Different Tiers
Instead of following the river, Kai determined that the quickest way south was to cut through one of the last true wastelands before southern Goralia became lush. Even the wastes weren't that forbidding, with a marked lack of monsters and much healthier trees than he was used to. But after several days, he realized just how weak the ambient mana was.
He hadn't thought about it that way, before doing so much cultivation. Mana didn't permeate the air like qi barely did, but it did fundamentally flow through the world more intensely in some places than others. As they traveled deeper, he no longer saw blue mana-using shrubs or diamond-winged butterflies. Neither had any real potency, nothing that could be used for training or potions, but even they couldn't survive here.
That day, he was waiting outside a village for Zae Zin Nim to return with some food and seasonings. Since he still didn't have a way to hide his twisted nature properly and only had two Class potions left, he tried to avoid others. While he waited, he cooked some monster meat for them.
With monsters getting scarcer, all they had were a few twisted rabbits. He split them into two groups, cooking half for himself while burning all the poison from the other half. Zae Zin Nim didn't like eating monster, but she could stomach it with the proper preparation. By contrast, he only felt slightly queasy while consuming the toxicity, then it did no harm. It had continued to taste better too, and this time he couldn't blame being so hungry.
Easier not to think about that. Kai turned from his fire to examine the village.
The huddle of buildings was strange to his eyes. Just homes, no barrier walls or even defensive structures from ruins. Such a place would have been torn through in northern Goralia, but apparently they could get away with it here. Kai spotted some young men about his age roaming around the village and decided that he should brush off his spiritual sight by checking them.
<
Name: ???
Total Power: 0
Physique Level: Null (0)
Soul Level: Null (0)
>
He blinked in surprise, then checked the young man again along with several of the others. What he'd seen should have been impossible: they had no Physique or Soul Levels at all, which meant he saw their overall power as 0. A stout and well-built man had a Physique of G-0 and one heavily scarred woman had a Soul Level of 1, but everyone else in the village was beneath what he'd thought was the floor.
Without any real conclusions, Kai just settled down to eat. He was mostly done by the time Zae Zin Nim returned. She tossed him a sack of fruit that struck him as shockingly expensive until he remembered how much more common fruit was in the south. Meanwhile she sat down beside her monster rabbits and began using new seasonings to blunt the taste.
"They don't have much here," she said, "and they wouldn't buy monster cores. What's bothering you?"
"Oh, I just looked at some of them." Kai's gaze wandered out toward the village again. "I didn't think it was possible to have a Physique below G-0. Is this place one of those lowest points you talked about?"
"Yes, this region is on the very first step of the Heaven's Path Scale. Any less and we'd be dealing with a void where life couldn't exist. There isn't enough mana for their bodies to absorb it while exercising and they'll struggle to grow in any way."
"I didn't realize there was a foundation I was taking for granted. In Cloudspire, does the denser qi mean you start with a much higher floor?"
Zae Zin Nim paused in the middle of her work, cast him a strange look, then nodded. "You could think of it that way. People who are born in the regions with the strongest qi can automatically gain an F-rank Physique during adolescence. There are also places where what you call spiritual vision is as natural as breathing, just because the energy is so dense."
"That's... a bit depressing. How high does it go? If there was even more energy in the air, could babies pop out of their mothers with E-rank Physiques?"
"Hmph. You might grow stronger in energy-dense areas, but don't be silly. I don't know about chakra, but the densest gatherings of qi in the entire world are on Cloudspire. So the highest floor is already known, unless the imperial court has better, or there's a mysterious fourth continent out there."
"Huh." Kai finished off a satisfying meal while thinking, then decided to risk another question. "Was it like that for you? Reaching F-rank before you were even an adult?"
She was silent for a long time, eating with tidy little bites. Eventually she swallowed, wiped her lips with a cloth, and looked up at him. "Thanks to your help, my cultivation is no longer risking deviation. Would you like to see?"
His eyes widened at the offer. It was basically nothing back in Monskon City, but offering to show someone weaknesses meant a lot more out here. When he nodded, he could feel her shroud easing, so he carefully examined her with his spiritual sight.
<
Name: Zae Zin Nim
Total Power: 149
Cultivation: Body Refinement 90% (100)
Blackblood Physique Level: F-5 (40)
Soul Level: 3 (9)
>
Her symbols were substantially different than those he'd seen before, but after all his qi training, he could make some sense of them. Where her Class would have been she instead had a Cultivation rating. Apparently she was 90% of the way through the Body Refinement stage, which strangely provided her with exactly 100 Power.. Her body appeared to use the same scale he knew, but it was listed as "Blackblood Physique."
He desperately wanted to ask her more about that, but he had the feeling that she had already revealed more than she was comfortable with. So Kai just tucked the numbers away in his head and stopped examining her so closely. Her shroud hid herself from his sight the next moment.
"You're already over 100," he pointed out. "I thought there was a barrier."
"There is, but it's not as important in Cloudspire. Most people break through it when they reach the Body Refinement stage, if they can reach it at all."
"I know I have a long way to go, but if I managed to break through Qi Condensation, how much of your strength would I have?"
"For cultivation? About the same." Zae Zin Nim shrugged. "Almost all of our paths have long plateaus at a given stage, then enormous leaps. That's part of what has me trapped in my current position. Your Classes rise so smoothly, they should be able to help me break through."
More teasing hints about her past he would have to ignore. Kai focused on cleaning up their camp and then cultivated a little more while she finished her meal. His own progress was a little stranger.
<
Name: Kai Clanless
Total Power: 62
Cultivation: Qi Condensation 5% (2)
Physique Level: F-7 (44)
Soul Level: 4 (16)
Monstrous Hunger - VI (zeta)
Direboar's Strength - III (gamma)
Aquagorgon's Health - II (beta)
Isulfr's Bite - I (alpha)
Rockspider's Claw - I (alpha)
>
All his cultivation work only put him at 5% of the Qi Condensation stage, though even that had increased his strength somewhat. With his Physique training slowing and no powerful monsters to challenge him, Physique and Soul hadn't improved.
On the other hand, he could viscerally feel that he had become stronger. "Direboar's Strength" had increased from beta to gamma and it made a substantial difference. Boulders that he would once have struggled to move he could now lift over his head. As far as he could tell, development of his monstrous characteristics left no trace on his human soul.
The fact that one had improved was encouraging to him. He still wasn't sure what Monstrous Hunger did for him, but if he could increase Aquagorgon's Health enough, he would be nearly invincible. On the other hand, the fragments of power he'd gained from the Isulfr and Rockspiders remained inert at the alpha rank. They didn't seem to develop intuitively and there was no one who could explain how they worked, so he was going to have to chart a path for himself.
As they headed out for the second half of their daily travel, Kai remembered another question. "Right, almost forgot! Did they have any apothecaries in the city or did you find anyone who would volunteer some Class mana?"
"You'd best give up on that," Zae Zin Nim said as they walked. "The people here lack the mana control to generate a bead like you needed, so of course their pill-makers lack the skill."
"That's not good. I only have two Class potions left, and one of them is Herbalist, which would just be distracting."
"Does it matter? I don't mind running the errands."
"It matters if I intend to ever enter civilization again. Such as, to list a completely random example, when we reach a bigger Goralian city and I need to negotiate your access to a mana pool."
She frowned at this, but eventually shook her head. Her hair was still uneven, but there was enough for it to shake back and forth. "If your cultivation develops far enough, you may be able to use that as cover. Until then, you still look pretty monstrous, so let me do the talking."
Another potential benefit to improving his cultivation. Kai continued walking in a pleasant mood, considering the possibilities. He didn't think that eating monsters directly strengthened him, yet he always felt better afterward. There was an animal connection there, if he could just tease it out...
As the evening stretched on, Kai was distracted by a mix of people ahead. Not just the faint presence of a weak village, but monsters and Classes in active use. He tried to shield his eyes against the sun and peered forward. "Do you see anything?"
"Looks like several wagons under attack." Zae Zin Nim needed to shield her eyes, but she could apparently see much further than he could. "I suppose you want us to go do something about it?"
"I think we should." As he started to run, Kai pulled his second-to-last potion out of his belt and drank it down. They wouldn't last so long after all.
