The mercenary dissected the earth devourer, after she finished healing me. I did a few jumping jacks to feel how my body would feel under any sort of pressure. To my surprise did I not find a single flaw. It was as if the fight had never happened. After I was satisfied with checking the condition of my body, did I crouch down next to the mercenary and watched her work away at getting the valuable parts of the beast.

  She was methodical in her work, and I quickly noticed that I saw no wounds on the beast itself. Since I would meet Master after the journey, did I ignore the question as to why she sent me into a losing battle, and thought about what to do now. In the end, I settled on practicing speaking again, it was far too inconvenient to not be able to form any words. It only took an hour of the woman packing everything she got into a small bag, before she was ready to go back to the city.

  I had just been making noises trying to figure out how vocal cords properly worked, and handed her a question I had written down, “How did you heal me?” The woman read it and responded in a bored voice while she packed the rest of her stuff up, “Body cultivation.” I waited a few more moments, but she didn’t explain further. I gave up on getting more information out of her, since I could just ask Master.

  The way back to the city and guild was eventless, and I just practice speaking the whole time. It turned out to be easier than I had first feared, since I could now manage to press out most words that only had the vowels o and e in them. When we arrived back at the guild, did I see Master waiting in front of the door. She seemed surprisingly nervous, though I doubted it was about my wellbeing, seeing that the mercenary had healed me after being ripped in two.

  The mercenary performed a short bow and then left me with Master. I walked next to Master in silence as we made our way back to the sect, when she asked, “I presume you lost. What were your last thoughts?”

  It finally clicked with me, why she did it. It was a test of character or of my resolve. I pulled out my notebook, since I wanted to properly explain what I had felt, “I was questioning where I went wrong to die, so early into my journey. I was questioning, if I had picked the right teacher.” I felt a bit petty, so I handed Master this part first before I continued writing, “Dying early poses a problem in becoming as strong as possible after all.”

  I read over the statement and felt a wave of relieve pass over me. If these were my thoughts and desires while I was bleeding out, then maybe I was really ready to sacrifice everybody and everything for just a bit more power. I must have been concerned by it without even realizing it.

  Master let out a small sign and then showed me a smile that looked borderline insane. Did she not know reserve, or did she just know that it would no longer be needed? “Perfect, this is really perfect. Like you might have guessed, I wanted to see if you would follow your conviction to the grave.”

  I idly wondered, if she had not considered that I might have lied to her, but ignored that line of questions, since it felt pointless. I had not lied after all. She continued, “I will make clear right now, that this will be the only time that I will send you on a mission where you fight to your death, in which you will get any support from me, that I did not tell you about prior. So, don’t rely on it.”

  We reached the sect and I asked, “What event is coming up?” She read the question and answered with a grin, “The selection of the new inner disciples is coming up. They will be decided through a tournament, and you will be fighting the eight best of them. Until then, will you be getting proper training from both me and elder Uim”

  We reached the trainings field, and I spotted the elder already waiting for us. Master motioned me to wait and went ahead and briefly discussed something with him, before returning to me. “Since you cannot talk for the moment, will we change the debriefing of your fight. Instead, you have until a day before the tournament to think of a viable strategy to defeat the earth devourer. Do use the library, to get a full picture on it.”

  With this, did she leave me alone with the elder. The elder sat down on the ground and motioned me to come over. He demanded, “Show me your control, you had time to train after all.” I sat down in front of him and began to replicate one of his shoes, or at least everything I was seeing. It took me around ten minutes until I got a result that I was happy with. The few days I had spent training while walking were already paying off as it seemed.

  He stayed silent for a moment, before he said, “Just continue practicing this.” I did as he asked and picked a random object I saw and began to replicate it. I then felt my control over the earth disappear suddenly. I tried again only for the same thing to happen again. I realized that this must be the work of the elder.

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  I tried to feel when exactly he took control away from me. It took me a few minutes to realize that he didn’t remove control from me, but instead just acted like a constant force that pushed the earth back into its original state. Every time I didn’t consciously control the earth, did it return back into the ground. After I realized what he was doing, I didn’t take long to properly counteract it. It was just the same I had already gone through with my body. In comparison it even felt easier, since I wasn’t trying to rely on habits.

  It took me almost a full hour until I managed to create the next sculpture. We continued this practice, until I failed something strange after a few hours. I felt drained of something and my control over the earth was mostly gone and only sporadically returned for brief moments. It took me a few moments to realize that I must have expended my entire Qi reserves.

  “We will take a break now. I will come back when your reserves should be full again. Try to feel how much Qi you have at any point, while recovering.” With this, did the elder leave me behind. I tried to feel the Qi as I made my way towards the library. I still needed to finish the assignment Master had given me. I couldn’t completely believe that I would have actually been able to kill the beast without some absurd luck, but I didn’t want to give up hope completely.

  I wrote down, “I want to learn about the beast known as Earth devourer. Where do I need to look?” on my notebook, before I entered the library. The same librarian was still sitting behind the reception, only briefly glancing up at me when I entered. I showed her my notebook for a moment and she almost immediately answered, “You access is still limited to the first floor?” I nodded after realizing that she actually still recognized me. “Shelve 127 contains an encyclopaedia with an entry on the spirit beast.” With the information handed out, she continued readying her book.

  I quickly found the shelve and the encyclopaedia the librarian had mentioned. It was called “About almost mortal spirit beast. A compilation of every important piece of information.” I took the book with me and went back to Masters yard, sitting down on the ground to accelerate the Qi recovery. I found the entry on the earth devourer near the end of the book. The first few pages were about how to make use of its body, where to find it and what it ate.

  After these rather unimportant pages, did I find what I was looking for. A description of its fighting style and there was even a general approach described on how to win. It turned out that I had already experienced most of what the beast was capable of, since the earth devourers were mostly hunters who tried to briefly stop their prey for a moment and then crush them with their giant maw. The book mentioned the pitfall they could create with their earth manipulation and the pull from the water. It also mentioned that some of the older beasts also used their Qi manipulation abilities to create small blades out of water and earth to destroy the ankles of prey.

  The book then explained that the easiest way to kill them, was through the underside of their body, as the scales were softer there. The book then made a few examples on how to achieve this. Most of them lured the beast towards solid and dry ground and then flip the beast over in some way. I knew that this wouldn’t work for me, since it had been able to supress my earth control through sheer force. I was curious how hard it actually was to supress someone’s control through force.

  I needed a reference point, on how strong the beasts in terms of earth control, and how much Qi it had to use to achieve what it had done. Even if it would delay my Qi recovery slightly, I decided to shoot a create an earth spike and push it down at the same time. I succeeded on the third try and had a feel for how complicated it was with pure force. It was practically just quadruple the Qi investment to force the spike back into the ground. I was guessing that you had to counteract the Qi of the original user, the will of the world that supported it and to push it down, you also needed to compensate for not using a proper technique.

  I spend the rest of the wait reading through the book again, to get a better guess at how much Qi the beast would have and if I could have stalled it out or not. The training with the elder was relaxing, even if it required a lot of attention from me. By the fourth day, I managed to propel myself forward with the earth while walking. It was still slower compared to running and required a lot more focus, but it was progress.

  Elder Uim asked me to name the technique, since I was the creator. I quickly settled on the first name that came to my mind, “Earth Strider”, not wanting to waste any time on it. Master gave me a pill to relax my mind on the sixth day of my training, since sleeping was not possible yet. The last day before I would need to fight in the tournament, did I manage to use Earth Strider while sprinting. I would probably not be able to use it in an actual fight, but I was getting closer.

  My practice with Elder Uim, also stopped on the day, since I would have the fights soon. I waited for Master to return, before I would relax to get ready for the coming fights. She arrived shortly after Elder Uim left. I took out my notebook, to go through the plan I had created one more time, and handed her a page with the question, “Could I perform most of my solution? I cannot talk well enough yet and text seems limiting.” She quickly agreed and I went to the middle of the training ground.

  The plan I had created assumed that I would have the knowledge about the beast, that I now had, since it would otherwise have been useless to have studied up on it. Still, I limited my abilities in terms of earth control to what I had before Elder Uim taught me. I had also, purposefully not practiced any of parts from the plan, to make it as fair as possible.

  My plan was a simple stalling plan. I would lure the beast in a relatively small circle and slowly drain the water from the field, while wasting its Qi by attacking its underside with spikes. I planned to drain the water by funnelling it out of the ring I would create. I also planned to always attack close to the side that was the closest to the edge of the ring. I was certain that the beast would tire itself out before I did. I was also sure, that if it tried to flee when running low on Qi, that I could then kill it with a few spikes with more Qi poured into them.

  I demonstrated each of the parts of the plan once, before Master then began to ask me questions about certain parts of my plan. How the funnels would affect the stability of the ground or if my stamina could outlast its Qi reserves and other questions in the same vein. Most of the questions were easy to answer and Master was satisfied after a short while. She then said, “I want you to take away one thing from this exercise. Beast fight relying on body strength and tricks. If you can make the body strength irrelevant and know the tricks beforehand, it is easy to defeat most of them. Humans in comparison rely on techniques and improvisation to win.”

  With that reminder, did she send me away to rest one final time, before the tournament.