On the other side of the room, once the stasis fields dissipated, the cultivator with the sword rushed towards the opponent closest to him.
His sword held high, he attacked with an overhead slash directed at his head, but it was dodged with ease.
His opponent was the martial artist turned yin cultivator. That wasn’t going to help him much, though, if he didn’t survive this fight.
He doesn't look that good with a sword, but I'm good with my eight limbs. May the best man win, he thought, but he knew in his heart that man was himself.
His opponent composed himself and lunged with his sword to stab him again. He dodged and kicked his right shoulder, causing him to take a few steps back.
The last hit didn’t do any damage to his courage, it seemed, as he pressed his advantage of owning a weapon again. He sent a horizontal slash at the martial artist’s midsection, but the martial artist caught it in time and kicked the cross guard of his sword.
He was briefly disoriented, so the martial artist followed with a kick to his face, knocking him down.
The martial artist looked to his side at Seph and saw him biting the neck of his opponent while the monkey distracted him.
I must be careful with that one. We will end up fighting, he thought.
Suddenly, he felt a cold liquid running down his side. Surprised, he looked down to check and found his opponent's sword sticking out of his stomach.
Idiot, never take your eyes off your opponent, he thought, scolding himself.
I need to get through these two while I'm wounded now. All because I was too cocky.
He jumped back, putting distance between him and the blade as he clutched his side in pain.
His opponent rose from his lying position on the floor.
He lunged at him, a big smirk filling his face, and attacked with an overhead arc again.
The martial artist sidestepped away from the attack and kicked the sword away from his hand. The man panicked and ran after it, but the martial artist took advantage of it, jumping on his back and putting him in a chokehold. A brief quick struggle ensued, and he snapped his neck.
He looked to the other two brawling cultivators and found that man with the monkey had killed his opponent.
He smirked as he walked towards Seph, thinking, one more to go…
* * *
Seph saw the two other guys locked in combat and got an idea.
He needed the heart of the guy who had lost consciousness from blood loss after fighting with him.
So, he went back, sat on the ground next to him, bit him in the chest, and pulled at it.
A short while later, a now mangled corpse lay in front of him. He reached within the chest and pulled the heart out.
Looking at the heart as if it were the most coveted treasure in the world, he started eating it. It was the most delicious thing he had ever eaten in his entire life.
With renewed vigor stemming from the energy circulating in his body from the juicy meal, he approached his opponents again at a breakneck pace, only to find them locked in a heated battle on the ground, the sword away from them.
He reached out for the sword and held it up in front of his face, turning it side to side with a satisfied nod, as if he even knew what he was doing.
Soon, the entangled disciples finished fighting, with the winner being the martial arts guy.
Done with his fight, the martial arts guy stood up and approached Seph with caution. He bowed down, hands clasped in respect, before attacking with a kick. Unable to dodge in time, the kick hit home, pushing Seph back. The monkey screeched behind Seph, but he couldn’t afford to look back at him at that moment.
Seph raised his new sword high, sprinted towards his opponent, and brought it down with an overhead arc towards the man’s shoulder. Surprised by his speed, the martial artist dodged to the right at the last second.
Seph thanked his stars that no one else who spawned with him in this room seemed to know that eating people increased their energy, speed, and strength.
Or perhaps the martial artist hadn’t had the time to extract his opponent’s heart.
Thinking fast, he attacked his opponent with a horizontal arc, which his opponent couldn’t dodge fast enough, and the sword cut a quarter of the way into his side. The martial artist screamed from the pain, but he knew that his very existence depended on this, so he held the sword with both hands and pulled it away from Seph’s arms.
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Seeing that his new toy had been taken from him, he sprinted towards the martial artist and tackled him to the ground, making his opponent wince in pain. Suddenly, Seph smiled at him diabolically. Straddling his chest,
Seph lunged at his neck, biting until blood covered the ground and the writhing body underneath him stopped moving.
Seph raised his head, blood running down his mouth, and gave his angriest war cry ever. Something was changing within him. He knew it was happening, but he wasn’t against that change at all. It exhilarated him.
* * *
Seph was deep in thought over what had just transpired He was becoming feral. Although he didn’t see anything bad from his opponents so far, they were fighting for their very survival like him. His teeth felt sharper somehow, and his mind went blank when he snapped at his opponent’s neck. By the time he became aware again, the guy was long dead, and Seph had been drinking his blood nonstop!
Seph got up and went to the prize pedestal. The stasis field around the prize had dissipated now, and an alluring blue stone was sitting on top of it.
Upon closer inspection, the stone had an eye carved into it. Its color was an azure blue—clear, with no blemishes.
Reaching out, Seph held the stone in his hand.
This has to be the most expensive item I've ever held in my life.
“Congratulations, yin disciple. In your hand is a skill stone. Skill stones are very rare in the world. However, you can find them in a myriad of places.
“Once you leave here, explore the world, and learn all the basics from your sect, you will start figuring out where to find skill stones, where to find martial art manuals, where to find special magical gear, and so on.
“To learn a skill stone, you have to hold it near the body part carved into it and push your yin energy into it. Keep at it till the stone dissolves in your hands, and only then will you be able to use the skill by circulating your yin energy to the body part that now has the skill.
“The skill you have acquired is called the Eye of the Appraiser. It is, as the title says, a skill used in appraising any item you will ever see. You can’t use it on living beings. The more you use the skill, the more proficient you become, the more levels it gains, and the more features you unlock for the skill. Skills have as few as five levels or as high as twelve. Eye of the Appraiser is an Epic skill, which means it has ten levels of progression. Each level will need certain requirements met so you can progress through it.
“Only you can decide what a skill’s purpose is and how you can make use of it. It can let you retire and take a less risky job appraising items somewhere, and it can make you the best opportunist cultivator there is, as you can use it to know obscure treasures or find hidden rooms during your adventures and so on.
“You can also use it to become the best trader alive, and so much more. Nothing is as simple as it seems. Life is not one visible track through a mountain. There are myriad paths and myriad ways to live it.”
Seph laid with his back on the ground, looking up at the sky. Each room didn’t have a roof, only the walls and the sky, but it didn’t feel like the real sky of the real world; something felt off about it.
Seph was thinking about Scorn’s words. He tilted his head down to look at the azure-blue stone in his hand. It hadn’t been a long time, but he had come a long way from being a water carrier to holding a skill stone of Epic quality in his hand. He was on the verge of getting better at this, meaning the next rooms would be much easier for him. He was finally making real progress.
He brought the stone up to his eye and started absorbing the skill. As the process was taking a long time, he looked inward and started messing around with the energy inside his body from the last heart he had eaten. He tried to circulate the energy around his body and was successful in his attempt. The process was slow, but he made steady progress.
Seph kept at it for three days as he continued to push energy from his hand to the skill stone. During those three days, he began to realize exactly how dead he was. He didn’t need to eat, and he didn’t need to go to the lavatory. He could stop breathing if he wanted to, but he breathed anyway because it helped circulate the energy around his body faster.
Meanwhile, the monkey was biding his time, messing around by himself, eating the vines on the walls for sustenance.
Once the three days were over, the skill stone dissipated from his hand, and he felt it imprinted on his left eye. He pushed energy into his eye to use the skill.
After activating the Eye of the Appraiser, he noticed that everything was colored a light, transparent blue. He looked over at the sword that was a little distance away from him.
Appraising…
Name: Iron Sword
Type: Sword
Quality: Basic
Magical Ability: None
“Okay, that’s a pretty excellent skill,” said Seph, rising from his lying position on the ground. He walked over to the sword and picked it up.
Then he looked down at his chest armor.
Appraising…
Name: Leather Chest Armor
Type: Torso gear
Quality: Basic
Magical Ability: None
“Fuck, why is every piece of equipment that I have of basic quality? It seems the rarest thing any of us could have found was the skill stone that I used. Now that I think about it, I never figured out what that root I found was.” Seph headed to his original spot where he left the bucket full of herbs and picked the root, checking it with his skill.
Appraising…
Name: Earth Root.
Type: Alchemy material
Quality: Basic
Description: One of the basic herbs used by cultivators. Rare for mortals to find but pretty common for immortals.
Location: Found in deep caves, in underground places rich with yin energy.
“Okay, that’s pretty handy. I wonder if that location description will work for rare herbs too."
Appraising…
Name: Fire Grass
Type: Alchemy material
Quality: Basic
Description: Even though it’s basic, it’s much harder for mortals to find this grass than many other popular herbs that mortals can get lucky finding in the world because of where they naturally grow.
Location: Found in the driest of places, where the heat is unbearable for mortals. Also found around volcanoes.
“I don’t know, Sun. Can I call you Sun? Like Sun Wukong of legend, the Monkey King, I always liked to climb trees to see the various wandering actors that would come to our village and put on a play for the people about different legends. That way, I didn’t have to pay money I didn’t own!”
The monkey didn’t object to the name and made happy yelps, putting on his patent wide-toothed grin and nodding in confirmation.
“Awesome, I guess we've finally settled on a name for you. This is a broken skill! And all this is in level 1 of the skill! Imagine what it could do at level 10!"
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