The Phoenix [Cultivation, Reincarnation, Tower Climber]

Slip the jab. Slip the straight. Backstep from the leg kick. Sidestep the front kick. Slip the straight. Duck the hook. Backstep from the front kick. Duck the wheel kick. Sidestep another front kick.

Any one of these attacks would incapacitate or even kill me the moment they land, but none of them get close. Now that I have oum, I can move better than before, and I don't need to dodge as closely as I did against Jinlan. I'm burning through my reserves to stay ahead of him, but it's not as much of a challenge.

For about a minute, I enter a flow state. I duck, sidestep, dance back and occasionally deflect the strikes that come too fast to fully avoid. I focus on the oum in his body, the sound of his clothes rustling, the wind created whenever he swings, the way his feet scrape on the dirt when his stance changes, the way his breathing changes whenever he's about to feint rather than attack…

During this minute, he slowly loses his newly-regained composure, and by the end, his attacks have gotten more reckless and sloppy again, so I start punishing him. He overextends with a kick, so I grab his leg and pull him off balance. He throws a punch that's too wide, so I duck under and deliver a hook to his liver. He tries some flashy jumping bullshit, so I step aside and push him a bit so he falls on his face.

After a minute of this, he starts to get calm again. He realizes that nothing he tries is working, so he starts experimenting. Double feints. Triple feints. A feint-attack combo ten times in a row, then an attack with no feint. Ten continuous strikes followed by a feint. A bit of hesitation in between attacks to throw off my rhythm. Attacks without oum to throw off my senses.

I have to admit, I underestimated him a little. It's not dangerous for me, but I was discounting him due to his clear privileged upbringing and lack of experience. Despite his first impression, he is a true genius. He's learning rapidly, and his combat sense is improving by leaps and bounds with every strike. The him from the beginning of the spar and the him now are no longer the same.

At the end of the next minute, I'm finally forced to open my eyes. The arena is silent as the spar continues. The cheers for him to teach me a lesson, or for me to whoop his ass are gone. I glance up and see a few are confused, but most are watching intently, hanging onto our every move. It's a great learning experience for them, watching a spar between a skilled master and a talented student.

A fist flies past my face, forcing me to look back at my opponent. His gaze is serious and determined, and I can see the gears working in his mind as he continues to learn and grow with every second that passes.

I frown. It's time to end this.

His next strike is a low kick feint into a hook at my head. It's a better feint than his earlier ones, but it's still easy to read. I duck the hook and step in, grabbing him by the shoulders. His eyes widen for a moment, and he tries to push me away, but before he can even get his hands in position, I load my leg up with as much oum as I can, and bring it up, my knee landing squarely right between his legs.

Handel doubles over, groaning, so I take the opportunity to knee him again, this time in the face. He steps back, nose bleeding and I kick him between the legs again. He falls to the ground, curling up in the fetal position as the referee construct calls the match in my favor.

I walk toward the staircase leading out of the arena to the sound of murmuring. The crowd parts as I walk away. Some of them give me dirty looks, but no one else tries to take up my challenge, and no one stops me. No one wants to get too close. Perfect. This is exactly what I wanted. I hold my head high and put on a satisfied smile.

Except I don't feel satisfied. Not in the slightest. It's not because of the result, because this honestly turned out better than I hoped for. I accomplished my goal as well as I possibly could have, and it only took a quarter hour of sparring.

It's not the method either. I did pretty much exactly what I meant to do. I put out a bold challenge, then backed up my boldness in spectacular fashion. I did get caught up in the moment a bit, but it turned out better in the end. I'm sure there are still plenty of forces who want to recruit me, but I doubt there are many people who want to challenge me after how easily I manhandled Handel.

Well, I'll have to figure it out later. I have other things to do today. I can't spend the whole time brooding.

After leaving the sparring hall, I stop by the Quest Hall and head for the monster hunting quests. I put my ring hand on the mammoth quest, as well as one for a white ferret cat hybrid thing that doesn't look that strong, but recommends an Early 2 star because it's fast and hard to locate. They both have about the same habitat, so I figure I can knock both of them out at once on my way to find the ginseng.

I don't leave for the northern region yet though. First of all, my clothes aren't appropriate for that. Second, now that I've done the sparring, I want to use that cultivation pill. I didn't use it before the spar because I wanted to be at my weakest to really drive home how skilled I am, but now there's no more reason to wait.

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From the Quest Hall, I head straight back to the dorm. It's almost noon, but the practical lesson hasn't ended yet, so no one is about. I use the emptiness of the dining hall to load up a plate for myself and Trinity and take it back to my room. I set her plate down on the ground and then go sit down at the dining table to eat my own food, but before I can take a bite, a dead body appears on the ground.

"Trinity, what the hell?!" I ask.

It's a young woman, probably around twenty or so, and her neck is cut almost all the way through. There is an expression of surprise on her face, and her eyes are open, but they are cold and empty.

"Where did you get that?!"

She doesn't respond, of course. She just walks around toward the neck and starts biting into the wound. I stare in disbelief for a few seconds. I legitimately have no idea where she got this. That's clearly a sword wound, so Trinity definitely wasn't the killer. I wasn't paying attention to her during my sparring matches, but did she sneak off and steal the victim from a different arena? How did she do it without getting noticed? Or did she get noticed and cause a commotion, and I just didn't notice because I was caught up in my own thoughts? There's no way someone gave it to her, right?

In the end though, it doesn't really matter how she got it. I can't have her getting into the habit of eating people. I stand up and walk past her toward the drawer with the bell in it.

"Get rid of the corpse," I say as soon as Henry appears.

"As you command."

A moment later, the corpse is turning to dust and Trinity is screaming and attacking the construct butler.

"Trinity!" I shout as Henry vanishes.

She looks around, trying to figure out where the construct went.

"Trinity!" I say again.

She looks at me, the trots over and jumps up, putting her paws on my knee.

"Mrraw!" she whines.

"You're not allowed to eat people," I say.

"Mrraw?"

"No more bodies."

She looks sad and jumps down, trudging over to her plate of raw fish and starts lazily eating. I wait a few seconds to make sure she didn't somehow get another body, then return to my own meal. After I finish eating, I retrieve the cultivation pill from my nightstand and pick up Trinity from the ground and sit down on my bed. I waste no time popping it into my mouth and starting the absorption process.

Having such a large oum core comes with a few disadvantages, like my oum taking longer to charge, and feeling more sluggish to use, but when it comes to absorbing pills, the bigger the better. The way cultivation pills work is similar to the way that Organa's first oum seed worked, though obviously not so extreme. They let out a large amount of oum directly into the core that the consumer can then circulate to rapidly improve their cultivation.

It's impossible to have perfect efficiency when absorbing pills, even for me. There's simply too much to take in. The highest quality pills are made in such a way that they release their contents at a steady, manageable rate, but it's impossible for it to both hold lots of oum and release it slow enough that it can be absorbed with 100% efficiency, so tradeoffs have to be made.

In this case, it's a very high quality pill, meaning I'd usually be getting around 60% efficiency, but since my core is oversized, I can hold a lot more of it within as I circulate it, bumping me up to closer to 75%. Trinity is going to be taking about a quarter of it, since that's how cultivating with her works, unfortunately, but with the boost provided by my core, it's a pretty miniscule difference compared to what I would have gotten if I cultivated alone and with normal core, so I don't mind much.

The process takes the entire afternoon, and then stretches halfway through the evening. I break through to Middle 1 star sometime around dinner, right when the pill's effects start to dissipate, and another two hours later, they're gone entirely. When I open my eyes, I find that it's close to 8pm. Trinity is asleep in my lap, purring softly. I debate going to grab food, but I'm not actually hungry. The pill seems to have had the bonus effect of nourishing me, so I could keep going if I wanted too.

I look down at Trinity again, then stifle a yawn. I guess I could go to bed now too. It's a bit early, but I'll just wake up early, and I can get back to cultivating. I probably need to shower, but I didn't sweat that much, and one day without won't hurt.

I lean back onto the bed, then adjust Trinity, moving her up so that she's curled up on my stomach instead of my legs. Her warmth feels oddly comforting, and it only takes a few minutes before I'm drifting off to sleep. However, the comfort I feel as I fall asleep vanishes almost instantly as my dreams once again take me to my past.

Every night at midnight in the northern sparring halls, the uncollected bodies from that days fatal battles are disintegrated. Originally, they were disintegrated instantly, but too many Climbers raised issues about wanting to give their friends proper burials, so this option was chosen as a compromise.

On this day there were seven deaths. Three bodies were claimed by Climbers who wished to bury the fallen, and the other four were gathered by the constructs to be disintegrated. Or at least, that was what was supposed to happen. Three constructs found their bodies and disintegrated them without issue before dissipating. The fourth searched the entire facility, but was unable to locate its target. After a thorough second search, it stopped in place and emitted an error signal.

A moment later, its creator sent back a reply.

"All clear."

With no capability of independent thought, the construct did not for a moment find it odd that its creator had chosen to personally handle such a minor error, nor why they responded so quickly. It simply returned a confirmation message and dissipated into oum that dispersed into the air around it.