NeoRealm – Staring Back Into the Future

Penny suddenly has a spark in her eye that wasn’t there before Jason accepted her quest. She quickly shakes his hand then says, “Thank you so much. Now I gave you 7 days but there is an easi… well quicker method of training it. First though the normal method. Simple enough to train if time consuming. Just inject a small stream of Energy into your heart then meditate while feeling where it spreads. This would take a long time because your blood vessels aren’t exactly designed to hold energy in. Basically, they will leak like a sieve to start with until they are strengthened enough to hold it. The bottleneck is when all your blood vessels can hold it properly. Now before I go into the other method try this out first. So sit over there and give it a go till you get the skill.”

Sitting down Jason starts to meditate. Breathe in, breathe out. Slowly falling deeper into himself the outside falls away. Breathe in, breathe out. Now there is only his heartbeat. Breathe in, breathe out. Visualize your body. Breathe in, breathe out. Feel your heart, lifes center. Breathe in, breathe out. Channel your Energy towards it. Breathe in, breathe out. See how it diffuses out, ignoring your body. Breathe in, breathe out. Feel the walls toughen. Breathe in, breathe out. Slowly the Energy stops leaking. Breathe in, breathe out. *Ding*

‘Right, update notification options is now on the top of my list’, sighing Jason looks up at Penny and informs her of having gotten the skill.

Penny nods, “Congratulations, it only took you 5 hours. From my experience you managed it in two thirds the regular time. Though I think that is because you appear to already know meditation. Do you KNOW how hard it is to get you younguns to sit still for a moment? Anyway since you know the normal training method, let me tell you the quicker way. Simply put, I will beat you up while you try and meditate on the skill. From destruction comes creation. Because it took so long you would not have noticed but the act of changing your heart to contain Energy was actually killing it bit by bit. The reason it is so slow is because your body limits how much the Energy can destroy at a time. Combined with the creative nature of Energy which makes it much harder to damage in the first place can hold you back. To get around that all you need is for someone else to mess you up so your Energy can just focus on healing. Specifically I will focus my attack on your blood vessels. Meditating after combat to heal will help a little but my methods allow you to go farther. Do you want to go down this route?”

“Sure, why not? It’s just a little pain and I suspect you are leaving out that the quest isn’t possible unless you are going this route. I have a bit of experience with this sort of thing and a week is much too short a time even for getting the most basic of foundations through meditation.”

Penny nods her head, “Yes, what you say is indeed the case. This is actually a place I have had someone fail at before. They wanted a body so strong no one could hurt them because they were afraid of pain. I let them cultivate it the normal way, hoping when they realized it wasn’t possible it would galvanize them. Instead they abandoned the quest. Clearly I had underestimated how much they feared getting hurt. Anyway, try to meditate on the skill again. Once you get back into it, I will hit you until you stop.”

‘Well I guess it is back to breathing slowly’, Breath in, breath out. Visualize the body. Breathe in, breathe out. Feel your heart. Breathe in, breathe out. Channel your Energy. Breathe in, breathe *Smack*

*-1* *minor bleeding*

out. Let the energy fix the body. Breathe in, breathe out.

*+1* *bleeding staunched*

Channel your Energy. Breathe in, breathe out. *Smack*

*-1* *minor bleeding*

Focus on the heart. Breathe in, breathe out.

*+1* *bleeding staunched*

Channel your Energy. Breathe in, breathe out. *Smack*

With each cycle Penny smacks him focusing on attacking his blood vessels. Slowly her face goes through a range of emotions before settling on one of shock and amazement. To herself she can’t help but exclaim, ‘What has he gone through that this isn’t knocking him out of his mediation. Sure I have had a few stay in it the first hit or two but this guy isn’t stopping.’

Slowly the time passes and Jason progresses with the skill. The hours start to melt away and Penny wonders if she will have to stop him from dehydrating himself. A day passes without notice. Soon another before finally something happens.

Jason in his meditation has fallen into his past. A day or two means nothing in cultivation. To him there is just the slow progress of his Energy as it slowly makes it way farther through his blood vessels. First the main vessels are changed, taking the over a day. With that though the change speeds up as the Energy can reach all corners of the body. A good portion of the next day was extending it into the smaller vessels. Finally in the last moments and one final smack the Energy charges through the capillaries completing the final change. With that all progress stops and it drags Jason awake, startling Penny. Just to make certain he opens the skill window again.

“Penny, I finished. How long was that? It didn’t feel like that long for cultivation.”

Looking a bit frustrated Penny informs him, “It only took about 2 days total. I don’t think that is technically a record. Your ability to meditate however amazes me. While others might have been quicker that only counts the time that they were meditating. The record for shortest total time definitely falls to you. All that aside though it is time for some secrets. The first is free and you could probably find it out yourself but the second I will need an oath to tell you.”

With that Penny takes out a Poster which is clearly something mass produced. On the poster there are two bodies pictured, both of them purple. The left one has a wizards hat, and the right has a sword. After placing it on the wall where it magically sticks she starts to explain, “Here on the left we have a human on his way to being a Magic User. To the right we have a fighter in training. Through choice or chance they have started their Energy down a path.” and with a tap of her finger the left figure shifts to a blue starting centered on the head while the right shifts red starting in the stomach area.

She nods her head, “Now they have reached saturation. All their Energy has now been converted to either Mana or Qi. Without outside influence they can stay in this state until breaking the level 100 bottleneck. The true path forward is to start solidifying their energy, centralize it. You can do this in any location of the body as while everyone channels it through their body to some degree, barring some specialized cultivation techniques, there is a specific location for each to form at. Magic Users will form their Mana Well and the best location is the brain. Warriors will form their Dantian, preferably just below the navel.”

She taps the poster again and both of the figures have the color drain into their respective centers, “The optimal time to do this is before level 10. To get there in that time frame though you need a cultivation technique. If someone makes it to level 100 without knowing any of this, they will have their energy automatically form a core. This core however will be located wherever they channeled it the most often. A lot of fire mages that end up doing this tend to have it in their dominant hand. This is quite the weakness when an enemy can just lop a limb off to disable their spells. It also doesn’t help that they can’t store as much energy because of an unsuitable container.”

One final tap and the image shifts through a number of common automatic core placements. For the Magic User this tends to be around their arms while the warrior was more varied though still focusing on the hands and feet. Taking down the poster and storing it away Penny continues, “Now neither of those locations are good for us but I am sure you know exactly where our core goes. As so we begin, so we shall end. With how my cultivation technique works we clearly need to form it in our heart. Now the other energies have a fancy name for the location but there are too few on our path. No one has even attempted to place their core elsewhere and to trod this path you can’t not form your core. Thus I call it the Heartcore. As for why you need to form it. Well that is simple. Once you form an Energy Core, it can’t be influenced by Mana or Qi. Without that the first normal monster you kill will taint your Energies purity. Anyway this concept of needing a cultivation method is generally kept under wraps. Makes it a bit harder for the lone person to get too powerful. There is another reason cultivation methods aren’t common knowledge though. It is the big secret I want to tell you and I need your oath. Specifically I will now pass onto you the Oath I had to swear to learn this secret. Here it is”

Not needing to really think about it Jason accepts it. With such a harsh penalty he figures the secret should be important.

Penny seems to get a notification before she nods her head and continues, “Okay with that I can let you know why I wanted you to learn the skill instead of gaining it from a skillbook or similar. To put it simply, gaining a skill from an outside source limits you. With most skills this might be a little hard to notice but it is very important with rarer skills and all cultivation techniques. When you gain a skill instead of learning the skill hmm. How best to explain this. Hmm. Okay since we have skill books I will compare it to books.”

Taking a second to actually figure out what she wants to say Penny the continues, “Take a regular book that shows you how to fold some origami. Learning a skill is like when you read the book you went from there and figured out how to do it yourself. You don’t need the book at that point and you can more easily make something new or improve your ability to make the stuff you already know. A gained skill is like instead of learning how to fold the origami you just kept the book with you. Whenever you want to fold that crane you have to take the book out and follow the pictures step by step. You can get better but there will always be that limit on how fast you can fold something because you always start with taking out that book. That of course explains why it is generally better to learn a skill yourself, especially easier ones. The reason for not gaining a cultivation method from a book is that you will get to the bottleneck your currently at and NEVER be able to breakthrough. It’s the differences between just making origami from a book and then trying to do blindfolded origami. You can’t fold the crane when you can’t see the page anymore. Worse yet, the world gets in the way because unlike a book the world makes you use it to perform a skill you gained. This would be like the book holding your eyes open and forcing you to stare at the page while using it. A bit forced of a comparison but there we are.”

Penny looks quite proud of herself before she seems to thinks of something and quickly adds on, “Oh and there are some skills you might want to gain after you learn it. You can do that by the way. If you learn how to do the skill, you can then use a skillbook to gain the systems assistance. This is really important with long or complicated skills. No one wants to mindlessly chant those absurdly long summoning rituals. With the worlds assistance they can space out or meditate. Just gaining a skill is bad as you always follow the guidelines it provides. A particularly poignant example is a long gone sect. They were based around one man’s skills. Because the founder was tired of reteaching the same skills over and over so he made an absurd amount of skills books for those basic skills. That was in the end their downfall. After all, no one is perfect. The founder had a particular quirk and it opened up a small gap in his defenses when he attacked. It was truly small and for a normal person this wouldn’t matter. However every skillbook he made forced that same quirk into all the sects disciples. Eventually as how the downfall of most sects like that happens they stepped on some ‘mortal’ who had heaven sent talent and a boat load of luck. He trained and after reaching a decent level of power went on a killing spree and took out a lot of the sect. Didn’t fully kill them as he saved his sweetheart from them so didn’t care. However it was the end for that sect because after killing so many he found that flaw. One sold secret to some enemy sects and the place quickly crumbled. So, yeah, learn a skill before you even think to gain one.”

Jason nods his head. This does make sense, and he had heard of similar stories. Then he realizes something, “Uh, so how do I form a core?”

Penny nods her head then explains, “Just condense your core. It can’t really be explained which is partly why you get stuck when you gain a cultivation method. Your types generally know a good bit so I can give you a simple example my teacher told me to pass onto anyone I teach this to in case they can understand it.” She then takes out a piece of paper and reads it off to him, “Vapor to Water to Ice. Same thing but different states.” After putting away the paper she finishes with, “So yeah, just experiment or something, You seem like someone that can figure it out. Anyway, I need to head off and do my actual job so I guess just stick here for a bit and work on it.” And she exits the room leaving Jason alone with his thoughts.

Akhier

Things I wanted to mention but didn’t:

Unique Rank doesn’t describe how powerful something is but rather that something about it is outside the norm enough that the system doesn’t know how to classify it. With only a handful of people at most having Energetic Body Reinforcement and most stuck behind the bottleneck there isn’t enough data on it. What if the skill was super powerful but the only people training it were bad at it or couldn’t bring out the full power? What if the only people training in a weak skill just happened to be supernaturally talented at it so it looks strong? What happens if the only people who train it are a group of sequestered monks that only spar against each other even though there are a couple thousands of them? Until the System has enough information on a skill, ability, or item then it will be unique.

About energy cores and their location. There can be multiple cores and be of multiple types. This is incredibly hard and barring a good cultivation method will be weaker. There is a very specific caveat to that though. If the person’s race would naturally have more of the normal cores physical location then they can form multiple cores which resonate with themselves and strengthen them. This of course means there are many more natural multicored magic user than warriors. The only common race to potentially have multiple Dantians are a somewhat rare people who are always twins as the two bodies are actually one person. They however tend more towards having one body train in Qi and the other in Mana as it allows better diversification and survivability.