The four talismans that Moxlin spent several hours inscribing were extinguished, barely able to create an image of Axl as a decoy. It was, admittedly, very rough, with hazy features and holding no Mana, and no cultivator would mistake it for anything other than a trap, but luckily, the creature fell for it.
The real Axl jumped out from behind the rock, [Attuned Drill Strike] already driving his fist forward. Ideally, the attack would strike the weak spot between the eyes, but the creature was too large, the angle wrong, and Axl feared it would rear back before he could get the angle right, so he settled for aiming at the left side of its face.
The soaring fist connected, the drilling Mana tearing into the liquid covering its body like paper and shattering the chitin below. The strike pushed forward, the creature reeling its massive, coiled body, but the punch kept pushing into the flesh of its head.
As Axl's body was propelled forward, the Mana currents formed a cyclone of disturbed poison and ambient Mana, even twisting the initial segments of the centipede around it, riddling it with cuts and breaking off legs. His own body also accumulated one wound after another, his armor tearing at the sheer power of the disturbance.
Then the creature's head was no longer in front of his fist, so Axl hastily dispelled the Skill. He'd invested nearly half his internal Mana on the strike, his mind reeling at the sudden loss. Still, he managed to land on his feet with a heavy thud, [Webcutter] drawn, immediately draining the serum and curing potions from [Gastric Cauldron] to deal with the poison and heal his injuries.
The centipede hive swarmer was coiled up again at the center of the cultivation array, its head looking severely damaged, with one fang severed at the base and the entire side of its face shattered and bleeding profusely. It also looked incredibly pissed off.
Axl activated [Mana Shroud] once his healing was on its way, and quickly had to empower his body with it to dodge a burst of green liquid thrown at him. His body instinctively sensed the ruinous poison density of the strike, even the hazy bit that passively emanated from it that grazed his skin was of shocking intensity, requiring his serum to rush to his melting skin.
Several more of the spheres were starting to form around the centipede's face, the shimmering liquid of its cultivation rising to the structures. Not quite the poison-and-wait strategy of the first centipede, but close enough that Axl activated his planned countermeasure.
He took out one of his talisman-empowered stones and threw it, not at the creature, but at one of the seven natural treasures of its cultivation array. The creature hissed with indignation and moved its body to block the attack, the buildup of the largest poison sphere pausing, two smaller ones dissolving back into the liquid.
If you use that venting shit in battle, I get to use it too, buddy.
Axl charged forward, [Mana Shroud] equally empowering his body and his blade, throwing out stones to strike at the natural treasures the centipede had to struggle to protect, unable to build up the frankly terrifying poison attack and protect the array at the same time. Unfortunately, the stones did no damage to the creature itself, its hard chitinous plates more than enough to protect the purely physical strike.
Aiming for one of the gems closest to him, the centipede made to block Axl's advance, but he pivoted to the side instead, aiming a stone at another gem entirely, allowing him to cross into the domain of the cultivation array.
It was as Moxlin predicted, the dense poison Mana within was picked up by [Mana Shroud] and churned into his body with shocking efficiency. It was as if the Mana wasn't just unaligned to any creature actively resisting the draw, but Mana that somehow actively wanted to be taken over.
Axl turned to the centipede barely five meters away, no longer bothering with the stone distraction, and charged. He descended fully into empowering his every Attribute with the pliable Mana, his body evenly attuned and balanced as his movements gained an efficient sharpness and flow.
The creature emitted an almost palpable rage, perhaps at having its cultivation stolen, at its injuries, at the sheer audacity of this cultivator fighting with its own poison. Whatever the case, it happily rushed into Axl's charge, tearing through the air, one remaining fang like a spear point to its fury.
Still, he had more, the Mana misting out of his body as [Mana Shroud] couldn't use all of what he drew in, but empowering the sword felt wrong, would get him off-kilter, so he dropped it. Seamlessly, he transitioned into a simple punch, pouring every remaining bit of the ambient Mana into [Attuned Drill Strike], his internal Mana forming an opposite coil in the spiral of the drill, twinned Mana, one with the heft of his internal stores, one with the decaying potential of poison.
He expected the strike to nearly deplete his internal Mana, but if anything, the consumption was greatly lessened, even as his mind struggled to maintain two of his skills active at once, a tight balance between them forcing him to stop.
The centipede rushed in, unheeding or uncaring about what its opponent was doing. As the very tip of its fang entered Axl's reach, he used his left arm to slightly deflect the blow, leveraging his body up, just above the direct charge.
His left arm melted into a slurry of rot, the last of his serum only able to halt the oceanic surge of poison at the shoulder, and he unleashed [Attuned Drill Strike] precisely at the centipede's glowing core.
The twinned spiral of Mana barely drove him forward, but the drill still effortlessly entered the centipede's head, the Mana storm in its wake a bare shadow of what it was before. Instead, the chaotic force was propelled forward, the dense mess of Mana in the cultivation array picked up by the twisting drill as if light into a black hole and propelled outwards.
A jagged hole formed from the creature's forehead straight through several segments of its body, then continued onto the forest in the distance, tearing apart three trees before dispersing.
Axl deactivated the skill, falling barely two meters from where he initiated the strike. A moment later, the heavy body of the centipede fell next to him as a surge of Karmic Energy coursed through his body.
Immediately, he sat down, cross-legged, and focused every stitch of his will on healing his body. The incidental wounds of his first [Attuned Drill Strike] were largely stabilized, but his missing left arm stump was still sizzling as the last remnants of the serum in his body struggled against the remaining poison.
He took out another batch of serum from his dimensional pouch and drank it, taking command of the liquid to stop the advance of dying tissue, barely managing with the help of [Mana Shroud]'s use of the dense Mana available to also boost his Vitality.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
The centipede's poison largely taken care of, he then drank a healing potion, letting the potion do its job passively as he looked around, straining [Mana Shroud] and his Perception to see if any threats were coming in. Say, an ocean of enraged centipedes wanting to avenge their fallen leader.
Instead, all he saw was Moxlin on his knee, frantically waving three talismans at him.
"Put these on!" she yelled. "By mommy's other hole, you just can't help yourself, can you!"
He picked up the three densely inscribed talismans. "What are these?"
"They help stabilize a limb loss, and seed a blastula to regrow it, unless you want to just have a stump from now on?"
Axl's eyebrows rose in surprise, not the least at hearing the term for a stem-cell-seeded limb tissue regeneration coming from the small spider. "How convenient."
"You're lucky I knew it was just a matter of time before I had to give you this. These aren't even the final versions of what I wanted to do. I didn't expect you to need it so soon! Guess that's on me! I'm the jester, look at me tumble!"
"Yeah, yeah," he waved her off, placing the three talismans in the clear circuit they should form on his shoulder. They siphoned off some Mana from his internal stores and activated, a cutting pain tearing into his wound, but it soon subsided into an uncomfortable tingling.
He still couldn't help but smile at the notification waiting for him.
>>Quest: Poisonous Vengeance
>>Update: Quest Complete
>>Reward: Challenge rift (Body tempering to poison)
>> WARNING: F-Grade trial, undergoing at G-Grade has over 95% expected casualty rate
>>Accept: Yes/No?
But that wasn't all. The big gain was some key insight into [Attuned Drill Strike], how it wasn't meant to be used just with his internal Mana, but combining that with another source. In hindsight, he felt like this was a big fuckup on his part, since it was right there in the name of the skill—it was an attuned strike, and here he was using it with his vanilla internal Mana.
He expected such a big jump in comprehension to earn him a proficiency bump with the skill, but what he didn't expect was for it to get him one with [Mana Shroud] as well.
Skills: Mana Shroud (Rare, Proficiency G.4), Mind-Soul Bulwark (Rare, Proficiency G.1), Attuned Drill Strike (Rare, Proficiency G.2)
In a way, it made sense, since he had to get the attuned Mana for the strike from somewhere, and [Mana Shroud] fit that bill nicely. He remembered from the [Oocile Cultivation Manual] that it listed an attuned core as one of the ones he could try for, and maybe that would be what he'd have to do if he didn’t have his first Skill, but the synergy between [Mana Shroud] and [Attuned Drill Strike] felt like a far more effective choice. No wonder upgrades given by the Deep System were far more highly valued, if they all fit so well with whatever else was going on under the hood.
Still, it wasn't a rain of hot shower and dessert tokens as he double-checked his current level. It was still unbelievable that he didn't gain a level, even after that last fight, not to mention the dozens of regular centipedes he killed. But nope, still firmly level 17, and he sensed he wasn't even near the top of that level as well, from how the latest surge of Karmic Energy felt.
"By my slitting vat, what do I need to do to level up?" he grumbled.
"Your cheating not going as planned?" Moxlin snickered. "Serves you right for making me worry again. I'm already losing precious leg hairs over your constant nonsense!"
"Yeah, yeah," he stood up, scanning the tree line again. "I'll ask the next monstrosity I fight to be nicer."
Not seeing any signs of more centipedes on the way, he looked at the treasures strewn around them.
"Can you make use of this cultivation array?" he asked Moxlin.
"No, it would deviate my path too much into poison stuff, which I don’t want. We should just take them, I'm sure somebody could use seven poison-attuned natural treasures."
"Hmmm, the reward for this is a challenge rift for body tempering to poison. Maybe they might be useful when doing that?"
"I dunno," Moxlin shrugged, already cutting into the large centipede's body. "I've never read about body tempering. Is it an elf thing?"
"The incredibly powerful cultivator that gave me [Gastric Cauldron] told me about the practice. Mentioned it was likely a good synergy with my class."
"Well, with a name like that, you should probably only accept the quest after your arm grows back again."
Axl agreed, so he took the seven poisoned gems, each one about the size of his closed fist, and placed them in his dimensional pouch. Their Mana was very well-behaved, even if attuned to poison, and he sensed it wouldn't do damage to his storage, was in fact much less of a risk than the poison-heavy fangs from the more powerful centipedes, which he had to wrap in cloth and keep in a sealed box the size of a casket to make sure it wouldn’t leak. He also checked if the ring he lifted from the orc was openable yet, but no dice, so he just turned to help Moxlin with harvesting the centipede and they started back into the forest.
He expected the centipedes to be in a tizzy, but oddly the area was now utterly devoid of them, Axl walking for hours and only encountering one of the weaker ones. Apparently, they simply scattered when their hive swarmer died, which he wouldn't really complain about, done with fighting them over and over.
Instead, he and Moxlin started combing the forest more carefully, keeping an eye for more natural treasures and wanting to avoid further creatures starting all-out wars with him. After all, he wanted to regrow his arm before doing any more serious fighting or meeting up with other cultivators.
A day and a half later, he noticed an indentation in a tree trunk's hollow with [Mana Shroud] and picked out an egg-shaped stone that emitted a cool, calming Mana.
"Oh!" Moxlin gingerly touched the smooth surface. "This is temperance Mana! A rather rare attunement that could be very useful to me, since it helps with Mana control for deliberate tasks like glyphistry."
"Keep it, then" he gave her the stone, and it disappeared into her storage. "I think I got the feeling for the attunement with [Mana Shroud], I'll keep an eye out for others like it. Should we comb this area more carefully, in case there are others like it?"
"Yes, please!" Moxlin skittered back and forth across his shoulders for a good minute in excitement, chittering all the while.
Axl waited for her to finish her little episode, having long since learned it was easier to let it run its course than potentially just charging it up further, then focused deeply on [Mana Shroud]. He narrowed his attention, honing his senses into the taste of the temperance Mana before setting out.
He noticed almost immediately that there was a whiff of the Mana around the trunk, a lingering sense that was quickly dissipating into the vale's normal chaotic Mana. But then he caught a thread of it, out in the distance, near a ruined statue with no limbs or head, half its body growing into a tilted tree.
Following the trail, he noticed the temperance attunement increase in density slightly, from the statue to a long, low wall. He followed it for nearly an hour, slowly and carefully tracking the ephemeral density of Mana, before kneeling at a nondescript stretch that turned into a knot of stone-fused roots and fished out another stone similar to the first.
As Moxlin flipped out in excitement, Axl compared the two stones, easily recognizing that they in fact had the same Mana attunement, emanating a constant stream of it. [Mana Shroud] could easily take it in just like with the poison attunement array, even if it was far less dense, but he could sense that they melded with each other, boosting the effect. The Mana felt like it would help empower his mental faculties well, but otherwise didn't feel particularly better or worse than other attunements that [Mana Shroud] could use for boosting his body.
This was good to note, since he would have to soon start figuring out how to build a cultivator's core, and if he should give it an attunement, and if so, what kind. Right now, he could only sense that temperance and poison wasn't quite a good fit, but not in any way that he could really explain.
But it was also good news that natural treasures of the same kind would pop up near each other, since it made it easier to get a full set when he stumbled upon the right attunement. No wonder the centipede managed to gather seven treasures so tightly aligned to each other. He started to really appreciate this Valley, how it really was a sanctuary by producing these natural treasures this way.
He spent the next few days scouring the few kilometers around the area, chasing after what they ended up calling [Temperance Egg]s. After getting eleven, Axl couldn't find any more, even after a full day of searching, the temperance Mana fully exhausted from the air. It was still an impressive haul, and Moxlin was beside herself at the windfall.
More importantly, his arm had largely grown back, a testament to his large Vitality and his nighttime speeding up of the process with [Mana Shroud]. While it felt a bit weak and off-color, it was time for some body tempering.