Hidden Realm:
Marcos swung with his full strength at the rock wall in front of him and the rock cracked again, a few liters of material breaking free and falling to the ground, and a small streak of golden blood being left behind. They had decided to split up and go to their own trials after defeating the necromancer and the blood mage, but would meet up when the system informed them that the time was almost up. Since leaving the others at the shop Marcos had spent all of his time training with his new cultivation manual at the tier three mining trial.
Unlike most manuals he had seen, this manual took a different path towards bodily refinement. Most of the Ilaryan manuals would list specific properties which one would need to will onto the different body parts, as well as methods for cycling the qi so that the different body parts would refine themselves to better match the pattern. On Earth the method was even more simplified into focusing on an ideal for your body and trying to refine the entire body at once. This method would would let you impart a wide range of properties on your body, as long as it was possible for your body to naturally gain even a small fragment of the property, but used a large amount of qi, far more with the less efficient but more stable Earth methods.
His method, on the other hand, listed means for recovering from injury and causing the body to reinforce itself in whatever way had stressed it, and listed specialized methods for doing so for all nine of the standard body systems as well as some subsystems like the digestive or respiratory system and some overlooked systems like the adrenal and immune systems. You only needed to stress the system and use the recovery and reinforcement techniques to heal the damage and spread the reinforcement to the entire system, though the parts near the stressed area would get the most reinforcement. For example, by punching the rock then recovering he was reinforcing his skin against blunt trauma, but the skin in his fists would be reinforced the most, his forearms less, his torso even less, and only a fraction of the reinforcement would reach the soles of his feet. Currently they only got around ten percent of the reinforcement of his fists, but as he used the refinement technique that would improve, possibly to as high as eighty percent once he had fully mastered it.
This weakness, however, meant that he also needed to kick the rock from time to time, and sometimes would even throw in knee strikes or elbow strikes to uniformly refine his skin. At first, using his full strength to punch rock that was almost as hard as steel had shattered the bones in his hand and caused him to bleed significantly, but over time he had used the techniques to heal and reinforce, and repeated the punches until he now barely skinned his knuckles despite his strength more than doubling from the muscle reinforcement.
“Nine thousand nine hundred ninety nine,” he said when his right fist landed, then punched with his left as hard as he could, causing more rock to fall. “Ten thousand.” he said as his right fist landed once more, and he stood up fully, leaving his martial stance and breathing deeply to center himself. The additional material needed to heal and reinforce his body had all come from bottled water and the ambrosia he had been given. He pulled the jar and a spoon out of his bag and ate another spoon full before licking the spoon clean and putting them both away. He had gotten to the point where he could eat more than fifty milliliters of it at a time, but had less than four hundred left, so he wouldn’t be eating it as fast as he could, like he had when starting this trial.
Luckily, the small book that had come with the jar contained instructions to make more of it. It primarily consisted of massive quantities of spirit fruit, as well as a few drops of golden blood to catalyze the proper reaction. When the correct refinement formation was used on it, concentrating the effects and speeding the fermentation process, a small amount of thick golden syrup would be left at the bottom of the container, which was the ambrosia. The water and various less nutritious things could be poured off of the top and the resulting concentrated nutrients at the bottom would act like a superfood and purge toxins in anyone that could survive its natural toxicity. The liquid could, however, be used as a spirit fertilizer if you mixed it with another weaker one like spirit compost or grew toxin resistant plants or mushrooms.
He sat down to focus on the healing and reinforcement. As he cycled the qi through his skin the skin on his hands healed at an almost visible rate, and the stress they had experienced was spread throughout his body, losing a small amount every time it was imbued onto a cell and then returned as a copy. When he finished a few minutes later, the wounds had completely recovered, and all of his skin was slightly more resistant.
He stood up and pulled out his original hiking backpack, which had no special effects of any kind. He had avoided using qi in every way he could since he had begun the training, only using the recovery and refinement methods. This had allowed his body to rapidly improve, though the areas his refinement had targeted meant that his skin, bones, muscles, and tendons had received almost all of the refinement. Still, it had been enough to push him up to the early part of condensation, from where he was in the initial part a few days ago. While this method could allow him to improve to the absolute limits of his body, the improvements had a down side. Any refinement of his body was amplified by his physique’s unique properties, giving him far greater results, but his qi conductivity had decreased by an almost proportional amount. Even the small amounts of refinement his blood vessels and nerves had received from the damage recovery and reinforcement process hadn’t managed to offset the decreased speed at which he could move qi, and he had been forced to use increasing amounts of mental effort to uses his techniques, despite getting better at the technique. He could probably get ahead of the negative effect if he focused on refining his blood vessels or converted his nerves, thus allowing more qi to flow through the new or improved paths, but he knew that by the time his physique had doubled the performance of all of his body parts his conductivity would be subject to at least a 40% reduction.
He had looked through the book on physiques during one of his meal breaks and learned a bit about physiques in general as well as memorized all the book had on his own physique. It was called the Golden Blood Physique, and was a common physique. That meant that if nothing was seriously influencing its occurrence, like a eugenics program or disease which targeted those with it, between one in ten thousand and one in one hundred thousand people would be born with the physique. Even as common as it was, the physique wasn’t actually active in very many people because of the fairly extreme means of activating it. The book listed two such means. The first was what Marcos had done, pushing the body to its absolute limits. The second was to be affected by a lethal dose of poison. In both cases, the physique might activate to help the person overcome the stress, therefore saving them from death or serious injury, but the older the person was, the lower the amount of qi in their body, and the weaker their endurance and pain tolerance the less likely it was to activate.
While it wasn’t true in every case, the rarer physiques tended to have more extreme positive and negative effects associated with them. For example, while the Golden Blood Physique amplified cellular function at the expense of qi conductivity and boosted the resistance to toxins while making the person’s body more toxic, an uncommon one like the Blood-drinker Physique, which Marcos believed to be the origin of the vampiric lore on Earth, also boosted the person’s cellular function, but it killed blood cells and damaged the blood chemistry in order to do so, much like the blood-burn technique. The physique counteracted this by giving the person the ability to consume blood for the needed nutrients, but that ability caused a sensitivity to UV light. The improved senses of the Blood-drinker Physique also tended to grow stronger too quickly for the person to easily adapt, leading to light and sound sensitivity.
The history of the Golden Blood Physique was interesting, but largely speculative. Marcos had learned in school about the greek gods, and how in some of the stories they had golden blood and consumed something called Ambrosia which was poisonous to mortals. The system had likely called the food it had given him by that name for that exact reason. His best guess was that the greek gods were an ancient cultivation family which shared the Golden Blood Physique back when the Earth still had significant qi around six or seven thousand years ago. The multiple stories of incest among them might even be a result of the fact that a person might poison their partner if the toxin resistance of their body had grown too high, thus making their body too toxic and making their family members with the physique the only viable candidates. While he wasn’t sure about that last part, the idea that they were an ancient cultivation family seemed supported by the fact that the book listed a person named Adlos as the person who had pushed the physique the furthest, boosting his strength by a factor of fifteen. Marcos was almost certain that that was the same person as Atlas, the greek titan which was said to hold up the world.
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He hauled all of the stone he had broken loose over to box and dumped it in, using his backpack to move the smaller pieces, as it was the largest thing he had that could hold the stone without using the shrinking technique. So far he had made a cave about two and a half to three meters tall and over ten meters wide and deep. Once he finished cleaning up everything except the dust on the floor he checked his balance. If he sold everything he had gathered so far except the rare materials he would have just over thirty nine thousand points saved up. If he gathered just one thousand points more of material he could buy one of the forty thousand point cultivation techniques. None of the thirty thousand point techniques had interested him, as they were mostly elemental based, but there was a forty thousand point one that seemed to have some interesting body refinement methods as well, guiding the refinement much like a standard technique, but working faster. With it he could have a second technique to give his students which was far closer to what they were used to.
A System notification appeared in front of him with a bell sound, warning him that the realm would close in thirty minutes. If he didn’t reach that point by the end of that time he would be teleported out, losing his remaining points and a randomly selected half of his purchased goods. With most of his points being taken up by the cultivation technique he was currently using, he knew it would most likely be lost if the system was forced to teleport him out of the realm, he decided to cash out. After collecting all of his rare goods from the refinement system, including some that he hadn’t found at the last place and much larger crystals of the ones he had, including one as large as his thumb, he looked at his balance. Thirty nine thousand one hundred and fifty seven. He sighed. He had almost made it, but now he would have to settle for a cheaper manual or large numbers of other goods, like pills.
He teleported to the trade area and saw that people were lining up outside the store, including several people he knew, like Carol and Frankie. He didn’t like waiting in line, though, so he decided to go back to the trial and gather a bit more. When he activated the teleporter, however, the screen changed. “Teleportation away from the exit is prohibited when the portal is about to open.” He sighed, went over to where he could feel the qi starting to condense and sat down. Once the line had gone away or shrunk enough he would go over and do his shopping.
While looking around however, he noticed that several kilometers away there was a large blue wall. Frankie walked over, having just finished his shopping, and he pointed at it. “Looks like the system doesn’t want us to leave the area.” Marcos said.
“You know what this reminds me of? Those old battle royale video games where the game area would shrink to push everyone towards the center.” Marcos nodded in agreement.
A few minutes later, when there was fifteen minutes left on the clock, an announcement went out to everyone. “System Announcement: If a player kills another they get all of their victim’s possessions and remaining points.”
Marcos looked around and stood up. “This isn’t good.” he said.
“Do you think the system is testing us to see if we are violent?” asked Frankie, “or is it trying to get us to kill each other?”
The several hundred people around the area started looking around nervously. While they wouldn’t normally consider killing another person, the points the system offered were extremely valuable, and some of the goods you could get in trade were even more valuable.
“I had assumed that the System was being benevolent.” said Carol, walking over to the two men with Jim. “But now that I think about it, all of the tests were meant to make us stronger. With how dangerous they were, all of the weak people have been weeded out as well.”
Jim nodded. “They were fattening us up for the slaughter, so that the fight at the end would be more exciting. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they were recording everything that happened here and selling pay per view tickets to the footage.” Some of the others heard them and started talking.
“Well, I’m not going to let someone else kill me or my friends.” said Caleb from the other side of the group. “If anyone tries to kill any of my friends I will kill them in self defense.”
“No one’s killing anyone.” said Marcos. “We aren’t barbarians or psychopaths. We are from a civilized society, right? We are just going to wait until the portal opens, then everyone will leave with what they managed to get.” A few people who hadn’t yet spent their points looked at the store, and Marcos noticed. “Okay, I know some of you have points that you don’t want to lose. So do I. So here’s what we’re going to do. We will line up and will enter the store one at a time to make our purchases, and I’ll make sure that no one robs you or attacks you while you are shopping, okay?”
The time until the portal opened ticked down to ten minutes a few seconds later and another message appeared. “System Announcement: All purchases are now half price.” It said, and a few more lines appeared underneath it. “+1000 points for surviving through the first round”.
Even the slowest of people soon realized that the system had expected them to start killing each other, and was rewarding them for surviving five minutes of the expected bloodbath. Marcos realized something else. He now had forty thousand points. While he had hoped to earn this much to purchase the forty thousand point cultivation technique, he could now afford the formerly eighty thousand point celestial technique. A few people hurried to the store, also realizing that they could now afford something special. It took several minutes before Marcos could enter the store, and while he waited, watching over the others with the rest of his group to make sure that no one tried to attack a shopper, he opened up the shopping menu and filled it up with everything he could afford to the last point, the first item being the Celestial Cultivation manual.
Several other people had done the same, and only stepped inside long enough to push the ‘Buy’ button and store everything. Eventually the line had a break in it and he stepped inside to do the same, quickly storing everything before leaving.
Thirty seconds later, another announcement appeared. On top of the additional two thousand points that everyone received for survival, a new rule was implemented. “System Announcement: The last person to remain alive in the hidden realm will receive all of the points and belongings of the people that died in the realm before this.” The stakes had now risen once more. While staying too long would mean that you would be forced out of the realm, leaving it too early would mean that you were giving up on massive riches.
There was a gunshot behind the store and Marcos ran over, along with many others. A woman was standing over the body of a man whose pants were down, though another gun laid on the ground near him. “He tried to force himself on me and I had no choice.” she said, straightening up her clothing.
“Why were you back here with him in the first place?” asked a person and the woman looked even more frightened.
“He, uh, he offered to buy me something I wanted in the store if I…” she paused, realizing that she didn’t have to finish the sentence for them to know what she meant. “But after getting back here, I decided I didn’t want to do it, and turned him down. He didn’t like that and pulled his gun and I had to defend myself.” Suddenly the body distorted and disappeared, as well as the gun. The System had just cleaned up the crime scene.
“Did he buy you the item first?” asked someone else, and suddenly the crowd started arguing over whether that mattered.
Marcos thought that, while it would be useful evidence, it didn’t really matter at this point. Both of them had come back here with a gun. They had both likely thought that they would be able to manipulate the other one and kill them to take their points and belongings. While he didn’t know what the man would have used as an excuse when he shot her, but was certain that the situation was far too complicated for them to figure out. This would have to be reported to the police as soon as they were out of the hidden realm. He told the woman to hand over her weapon, but she stored it instead. While he could probably take it from her by force to prevent her from shooting someone else, any attempt to do so would likely result in increased violence from others, so he would just keep an eye on her for now.
