Have you ever had gastrointestinal problems? Constipation, specifically. When you really want to, but you just can't. If you have, then you understand about one percent of what I was going through.
My profound veins were full. I could break through at any second, but... it wasn't that I couldn't. I didn't want to. I mustn't. Absolutely mustn't.
In my opinion, the Elementary Realm is the most important stage. This stage determines everything. And this is precisely the stage where a practitioner acquires elemental affinities. I had affinities with almost every element except, perhaps, light and darkness. But every single one of those affinities was weak. Far too weak.
If we simplify this as much as possible, for idiots: imagine a profound vein as a pipe the thickness of your leg. The entire profound vein is colored scarlet, symbolizing that the vein is maximally suited to working with Phoenix fire. And on that scarlet surface are lines the width of a hair. Those tiny lines are my affinities with the other elements.
Yes, water and lightning were two or three times wider. But we were still talking about hairs. Against a huge pipe.
And I did warn you, by the way, that I'd be using analogies for people of limited intellectual ability, so don't wrinkle your nose at my analogies.
I already explained why I needed an affinity for water—or, more precisely, ice. Lightning? That was a cheat code for the future. Because in this world, at some point in my development, the shitty bot upstairs would decide it didn't like me. And start testing my durability with lightning.
Some buggy script whose purpose nobody has figured out yet, though everyone makes profound declarations about it. The Heavens are jealous, the Heavens test you, the Heavens baptize you, and so on. Personally, I'm betting on a bug.
Obviously, the creator gods of this world were a little touched in the head, so they left a pile of bugs behind, while the local simpletons build grand theories around them.
Either way, our Trash had demonstrated in practice that if you had an affinity and good resistance to lightning—more precisely, not just good but very good—you could get a lot out of it and skip a couple of cultivation levels.
I understand that thinking about this while still in the Elementary Realm was slightly ambitious. Plenty of people never even reach the Earth Profound Realm, and here I was worrying about divine realms.
But good planning is the key to spectacularly ruining those plans. Or was that saying different?
If I hadn't had the inheritance of the Rage God, I would've died a long time ago. As things stood? This was tempering my profound veins. They stretched, grew wider, thicker, and tougher. Maybe all the divine inheritance I'd received from the chicken gave me was a weak little flame and no other benefits, but what was stopping me from creating an inheritance of my own?
Maybe all these pseudo-gods couldn't break through and become true gods precisely because they had nothing of their own? Only inheritances from others. You can't build a proper house through looting alone, after all.
In short, switching to elevated, pompous cultivator language, I was building a solid foundation. And that was only possible in the Elementary Realm. But there was a price to pay. It was unbelievably unpleasant. Not painful—specifically unpleasant. There was a reason I used constipation as the analogy.
Only exhaustion brought relief. And I had no objection to that.
I left Phoenix Village exactly one day after coming out of the trial. For now, all my business in the village was finished. More precisely, if I were Trash, I could have simply never returned there at all. But I'm not Trash, am I? I'm going to visit my native clan, right? I'm going to look after their safety and bring them piles of gifts too, right? Naturally!
So how was I spending my energy? Developing a new movement technique. The foundation was the same: inertia plus minimal upward movement. But now I was improving the technique not merely for dodging, but for long-distance travel.
The same game with inertia. The moment I pushed off the ground, the inertia from my leg transferred into my upper body. While running, I leaned as far forward as possible.
Normally, that's a direct road to planting your face into the ground. But I didn't fall as long as I kept moving forward. At those speeds, the headwind actually helped too, so somehow the whole thing worked—and worked extremely well.
I wasn't far from achieving that coveted boom. That was how fast I ran. Of course I was clumsy, and of course I crashed into trees a couple of times. And the most important part? I couldn't brake. The moment I stopped—face, ground, pain. You get the idea.
The solution? After breaking through, use some magical-energy method to completely cancel out my inertia. But that would only become possible in the True Profound Realm. For now, I had to live with the drawbacks.
The Falling Star Technique. Sounds beautiful until you realize the falling star is you the moment you stop. I really am gradually getting infected by the pomp. How tragic.
Naturally, I didn't hesitate to fight plenty of beasts along the way. The Great Way of the Buddha had reached the second level, so my combat power had increased quite a bit. Now I could butt heads with beasts in the Spirit Profound Realm. I didn't always win, of course, but I always had time to get the hell out if defeat appeared on the horizon.
This time, however, I wasn't after their energy, but their profound cores. I also watched the ground for all sorts of flowers and fruits useful to local practitioners.
I needed money. A lot of money, to be honest. So maybe I even overdid it a little. But this was far more important.
By the time I was done, the huge hiking backpack on my back was almost full. And I'd spent a long time designing it to hold as much as possible. Even if the Feng clan knew about spatial rings, they certainly hadn't seen anything like one in a very long time.
Fortunately, I knew who I could get such a toy from. And after a month of travel, I even met those nice people. The Black Demon Mercenaries. Those guys were based in the Ten Thousand Beast Mountain Range.
"Excuse me," I addressed the stunned guy after dusting myself off after the fall, "would this happen to be the camp of the renowned Black Demon?"
The man couldn't even answer right away. He was still processing the fact that I'd appeared out of nowhere at tremendous speed and then dug a five-meter trench with my head when I fell. But apparently what stunned him most was that I got up and dusted myself off as if that were exactly how things were supposed to work.
"Black Demon?"
"What? Ah, yes, yes. This is the base of the Black Demon mercenar—"
His head went rolling after I appeared beside him in an instant and flicked my katana through his neck. I didn't let the man finish. Why bother? These people were planning to attack my clan. I couldn't stand the twins or their daddy, but they were still my clansmen. And their mother was pretty... Never mind. This trash took those children hostage.
And I'll break the fourth wall, come over there, and rip your mouth apart if you compare me to Trash Che. I'm not planning to kill these people, then go find every one of their relatives and cold-bloodedly murder them under the slogan of "leave no avengers behind"—or is it "pull up the roots when removing weeds"? That's what the local psychopaths say, right?
The comparison doesn't work. There were no innocents in this mercenary group in the first place. No women, no children, no support staff.
This was the first time in this life that I'd killed sapient beings. In my previous life, though, I had plenty of experience with it.
The moment the guy fell, two more Nascent Profound Realm cultivators rushed me. But these fellows had stopped being opponents for me a long time ago. Their speed just wasn't there.
I never stop praising myself for having common sense. Speed decided everything. Literally everything. No matter how many people attacked me, I could dodge and counterattack.
Here's a simple truth for you. Speed is power. Especially if you're at least somewhat savvy about playing with inertia and transfer all the inertia of your movement into the blade. Then it becomes lethal even against Spirit Profound beasts.
No surprise even their leader simply didn't have time to do anything. Nothing at all. My movement skill was perfect for exactly this strategy. A sudden dash toward the enemy and one slashing strike, and anyone falls apart into two pieces. Though my katana had been threatening for a while now that it wouldn't survive this kind of abuse much longer.
And don't think I'm breaking canon by doing this. That would be naive. We're talking about Fate's favorite. He'll accidentally fart, change routes so the beauty beside him doesn't smell his masterpiece, and accidentally stumble onto a "mysterious" path that leads him straight to my clan. And there he'll find a hypocritical bird, Chinese-manufactured deus ex machina model.
Want to bet?
At least I got three whole spatial rings and a stash of cash. I didn't touch the rest of the junk. There was nothing valuable there in the first place.
There was also a map, and according to it, at my speed I could reach New Moon City in a couple of weeks. There was a branch of the Black Moon Merchant Guild there.
That was exactly where I needed to go at the moment. So I didn't linger long around the dead mercenaries' camp and immediately continued on my way.
I didn't like this part of the plan because I had far too little information. I had no idea what the goods I intended to sell were worth. I had no idea what the goods I intended to buy were worth either. I didn't even know whether they would have everything I needed.
But theoretically, this merchant guild was the largest on the continent. Which meant there was hope they could get just about anything.
A little earlier than I'd expected—nine days later—I entered the city. The first city I had seen in this world. Not impressed. Too many people, can't see shit. Buildings were two or three stories tall but stood far apart, while walls were everywhere. The streets were wide, but hardly anyone walked on them. Everyone preferred shoving their way along the sidewalks.
That was an obvious trigger for the arrogant young-master script. The moment I walked out into the street like some "smartest guy in the room" protagonist, some carriage carrying a young master would try to run me down, then there'd be a conflict with an entire sect and all the other por... movies with unconventional content. Let's put it that way.
So I pulled a hood over my head, lest some important big shot grow jealous of my beauty, and made my way to the merchants.
"Senior, I have quite a lot of goods here. Perhaps it would make sense to appraise them somewhere private?" I asked the merchant, whose cultivation level I couldn't make out.
And to add some weight to my words, a Spirit Profound beast core appeared in my hands for just a second.
A minute later, we were already in a closed room on the second floor, and the seller had been replaced by some young guy. An apprentice, probably.
"Very well, junior. Put all your goods on the table. We'll appraise them."
"Let's start with the cores. Dumping everything out like garbage would be a little inconvenient."
And then we haggled for exactly five hours. Because there was no way around it. I know perfectly well that I still got ripped off. But I couldn't just agree to the first price like a sheep, so I colorfully described every beast I'd killed with such enormous difficulty to make sure this flawless core ended up on this table.
Then came the flowers. And that was where I started reading my opponent. It's like poker. There are always tells that show how excited the other side is.
That was how I kept them from screwing me when some seemingly ordinary flowers, which looked completely unremarkable to me, turned out to command sky-high prices.
What a shame that by the end of the day I didn't have a single coin left. I spent all the money buying or urgently ordering a medical manual, techniques—any techniques at all, as long as they were as easy to learn as possible—and a couple of trash-grade cultivation manuals.
And the most expensive thing I managed to get? A dual-cultivation technique, also very low-level. Not trash, but not especially useful either. It increased cultivation speed by about twenty percent, when a proper manual should've given two hundred.
But the whole point wasn't to take everything I'd bought and master it right there on the spot. What kind of stupidity would that be? I wanted to master the basics. Understand what these techniques actually were. What they consisted of. How they were created. The mechanics, in short.
And in that regard, the dual-cultivation technique sat at the very top of my priorities.
I spent a couple of days reading local medical manuals while waiting for the rest of my order, and once I received everything I needed, I immediately left the city.
There was nothing else for me to do there. I had gotten everything I wanted in full. Next stop? The Wasteland of Death. Fortunately, getting there was fairly easy.
And no, I wasn't going there for the inheritance of the Primordial Azure Dragon. Things were much sadder than that. I needed to fight a high-level beast in the Earth Profound Realm. More precisely, I needed to get its core so I could improve my lightning.
A working method, by the way. Break a core containing the element you need, take the shards in your hands, and activate the Great Way of the Buddha.
A broken core is already leaking. An ordinary cultivator can't directly absorb profound energy from a core. I didn't need to, either. Instead, I passed that energy through the technique's pagoda, filtering it, then tempered my body with that energy.
The benefit: I increased my affinity with the element.