Todd sits on his bed in his blue stone private instanced room. His bedroll is battered and dirty. He considers buying a new one before reminding himself that it would be a waste of his sparse resources.
His share of the metal ingots is stashed underneath the bed. He assumes they’ll sit there for the duration of the tutorial.
After a moment of thought, he pops the two pills into his mouth and swallows them. At first, a clean, zesty taste and aroma hits his palate. The freshness runs down his esophagus to his stomach. Once they settle though, the sensation starts to turn. Harsh, stinging tendrils quest out from his core: first a handful of thin, nettling things, then growing to dozens of barbed wire strands.
Todd leaps up and slaps at his body, scratching and rubbing.
“Ah, what the heck! What the heck!”
The cold, lacerating tentacles of the medicine crawl through his veins and through his cultivation channels. They slither into his heart and it stutters, robbing him of breath. It pours over his organs, in and out, it pushed towards his skin.
Todd can’t escape. He can’t avoid or negotiate. He rolls on the floor. He leaps up and paces. He screams.
But he can only weather the treatment; can only come to terms with it. Lying on the bed, he crosses his arms, and makes his mind a tranquil lake. He imagines the pain as drops of falling rain on the surface.
Minutes pass. The medicine runs its course. Todd’s skin stings.
Sitting up feels disgusting. He peels from his bedroll with a sticky tearing. His clothes adhere to him like they’ve been pasted on. A cloying, wretched stink wafts through the enclosed room.
Todd gags as the smell tickles the back of his throat.
He looks down at himself and finds tiny beads of brownish tar coming out of his pores. It’s everywhere over his body, it’s infused into his clothes.
Todd strips naked and takes a shower immediately. He scrubs out his clothing with his precious remaining soap. Shivering, he leaves the alcove and throws his clothes spread out onto the floor. His bedroll is ruined. He isn’t sure where he can throw it away. Maybe Abby Fletcher will burn it for him.
Todd stretches his back. Frankly, he feels good. Refreshed.
He knows that there’s a cost, though. The pixies warned that pills like this have a certain amount of hidden toxins in them, poison which will build up over time and hinder advancement to the D-grade.
But on the other hand, those considerations are so far away. He has a chance to live for hundreds of years. That would be more than enough. Asking for even more is grasping for something he can’t begin to imagine.
Todd sucks it up and buys a new bedroll for cheap. This one is little more than a flat mat of reeds, so he hisses through his teeth. But he throws his old bedroll rolled up into a corner and lays the new one down over the bed frame.
It takes him half an hour of tossing and turning to get to sleep. Vague, color drenched nightmares with confusing plots drift through his head.
Seven hours later, Todd returns to the plaza still wet and carrying his old bedroll at arm’s length. He sneezes.
He drops the roll off in one of the section’s walled off linking corridors with the rest of the refuse. Looking at the height of the pile and smelling it too, he renews his intention to ask for someone to burn the trash.
It is early evening. Todd returns to the center of the plaza and joins the loose circle of people cultivating. Only a small number of folk are out at this time, though more are arriving as the first wave of sleepers awaken. A man and a woman make room for Todd and he plops down in the cross legged position. He says hello and introduces himself to them. He tries to remember their names.
Di?u Quoc leads the group now. His English is broken, but he is a facile communicator. Using simple words, he manages to get his point across better than some native speakers might have done. Todd listens for a while, but once he’s satisfied everyone is in good hands, he focuses on his own exercises. He doesn’t feel quite ready for the fourth stage of the cultivation manual, so he grinds. His energy feels like a millstone, wearing down impurities in his body. His level advances slowly but surely as he absorbs cosmic energy from the air.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
He frowns. The energy seems thin. It flows, and he snatches as much of it as he can, but the amount available is overall lower than before. He rolls his shoulders. It just means he has to work harder.
Ciforre floats over during their session and offers pointers of her own. Noticeably, she focuses on the highest performers. She even makes some suggestions for Todd in approaching the fourth stage. Mainly, it’s a matter of juggling multiple threads at the same time. The method she offers Todd can be considered a pseudo-technique. It’s an alteration to his cultivation manual that trades advancement speed for practicing fine control.
Todd tries the strategy out, alternating which channels he guides energy through. Balancing the flow and isolating certain pathways is key. It’s an annoying exercise that taxes his brain, but he already sees how it could be useful if he adjusts to this kind of thinking.
Settling in, Todd lets his surroundings fall away as he focuses on improving. An hour passes.
Eventually, he summons his menu and inspects his attributes.
Reviewing his screen he spots the increase in his intelligence first, then notes that it carries through to his wisdom and luck.
Searching for the cause he finds that his title attribute has changed. [Tutorial] has updated to provide a flat plus two to all attributes. It’s a nice reward, though now his dexterity is falling behind.
From checking in with other cultivators, he’s found out that the title rewards for the lower difficulties is significantly reduced. It’s yet another way that they are being incentivized to push themselves harder.
Todd wonders what he is going to do. The parting words of pixie Befor ring in his head. Even though she’d prevaricated, she’d just as good as admitted that there was a new challenge coming tomorrow.
Now that the survivors of section four had organized and adapted to their new reality, they have discovered that the harder difficulties are much less necessary to attempt than they originally thought. Good planning and willing cooperation was all it took to keep people alive and fed.
It didn’t sit right with Todd. Knowing that he had a moral obligation to take easy mode disappointed him. There would be fewer attributes, cheaper rewards. He knew it was an irrational way to feel. But at the same time, he knew that this tutorial was an opportunity, probably a once in a lifetime opportunity. People could and would make their fortunes here.
The further he pushed himself, the better off he would be in the new world to come. It was a selfish desire, but also a practical one.
There were plenty of reasons to justify it to himself. The pixies had warned in no uncertain words that dangerous beasts would wait for them when they returned, creatures much fiercer than the ones they faced in the tutorial. There was also the incursions. Alien invasions seeking to plunder the resources of the planet. Someone would need to step up and protect the mortal citizens of Earth from these threats.
But these felt more like excuses than causes. When he’s honest with himself, what he really wants is more of the [constitution pill]s. Old age frightens him, and the idea of delaying it just a little longer is so appealing he knew he’d dive into monsters to fight for more.
Unable to concentrate any further, Todd finishes up his cycling and rises. His bag never leaves him now, and he guards it watchfully. His ixwa’s tip is nearly regrown and it pokes out of the satchel and nips at his elbow occasionally.
Out in the plaza, the metal plates which control mission difficulty have not disappeared. They sit, breaching the tile in a row.
There’s a small crowd gathered around the plates, and an argument has broken out there; more like several arguments all at once.
Spotting several people he recognizes, Todd pushes forward to listen.
“Don’t you want to live longer Serena?” a bearded young man pressures his team.
“Except I don’t want to die now,” refuses a young woman. “You’ll get us killed, Andre.”
“We all did normal mode before and we can do it again,” continues the young man.
“You didn’t lose anybody. We did,” the young woman bites back.
“That just means all the weak people are gone,” Andre argues.
“What the fuck, man,” Serena exclaims, “what is wrong with you?”
Andre palms his face. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he says.
The young man tries to walk back his words, but he keeps making it worse. The young woman storms away and he chases after her fruitlessly.
The fight is indicative of the other debates going on. Everyone has heard of the [constitution pill]s by now. It’s changed the calculus. Groups that were happy to coast on easy are now considering risking normal. Groups that hazarded normal mode are looking seriously at the rewards for hard.
At first, Todd just listens. He tries to think about what he should tell these people. Their lives are at stake here, and some people have very unrealistic expectations about their chances. At the same time, some of these people would be better prepared than he was. They are more athletic, more confident, more skilled. They just need time to come to terms with their situation, time to adjust to attribute screens and bonus points.
After all, cultivation is slow. It’s so much quicker to kill. Todd doesn’t want anyone to die, but he isn’t sure that people should be held back either. It’s not like anyone is pursuing extreme mode again.
But Todd isn’t able to sit on the sidelines of this parliament. He is recognized by a young man called Trevon. The teenager calls Todd out and asks him about his experiences on Caquiba IV.
Todd is suddenly at the center of attention of a large number of people. He shrinks into himself at first, then marshals his guts to brave public speaking.
“It was rough,” he begins, “we were fighting constantly the whole way through. There were monsters everywhere, and they were too tough for our [mercury rod]s to hurt them. All of them had natural defenses or were poisonous, or had something else going on. It was bad. We were always running low on cosmic energy. We slept in shifts when we slept at all. There were no hints on the quest we were given and we had no idea where to go. When we didn’t complete it, the system sent a monster at us and it was absolutely huge. It beat us up bad, and it bit off my friend’s foot.”
“But that was extreme mode, right?” asks Trevon’s friend Martin.
“Hard mode wasn’t quite as bad,” Todd admits, “but it was still tough. It was underground the whole time and there was barely any light. We were wandering around nearly blind without any directions for two days. We only got lucky and found a hint of where to go at the end. It helped that the monsters were weaker, but there were still a lot of them. There were even some with skills. Even then, the only reason we got the treasure was because I put a bunch of points into wisdom, and it helped us get through a trap.”
“You had to put points into wisdom?” asks a disappointed voice.
“For this one, yea. For the first one, it didn’t matter,” Todd reports. “Maybe it would have, if we’d pursued the quest.”
“What kind of monsters were there?” another cultivator asks.
Todd tells them. He gives a rough rundown of the unusual beasts he faced. Specifically, he makes sure to warn them about the savage wingless griffon monster and the insufferably durable wood golem.
Todd removes his forearm length coral spear from his bag and lifts it up. “We wouldn’t have been able to take them on without our weapons token weapons. If you didn’t earn one during the redburr crab fight, I don’t know if you can even tackle hard.”
“What if we got some from the treasure hunt?” young Martin asks.
“Some of the stuff from this last mission could be really good. But I wouldn’t risk it unless I had at least one reliable weapon. Maybe you could pool your money and buy a decent one?”
“So if you got a late start you just fall further behind?” Trevon bemoans.
Todd looks him in the eye and then sweeps his gaze over the assembled cultivators. His voice is full of regret. “I don’t think it’s meant to be fair,” says.