5 Imagination
Claire wakes up from a good night's sleep, feeling full of energy, but, as she tries to get out of the bed, her arms scream out in pain and grimace spreads over her face. "Fuck, this is a lot worse than I had expected, but I suppose that that's what happens when I overestimate the recovery of my body after cultivating." She gets out of bed and does some stretches, giving especial attention to her arms. The pain slowly diminish, but it's far from gone, in an effort to do something against it, she does some pushups, which helps a little.
"Phew, at least activating the muscles helps, but it'll probably return once I eat breakfast, or maybe even before that." She gets dressed and goes to the pub for her breakfast, this time consisting of a tasty porridge. While she was eating, the muscles in her arms cooled sufficiently down to start soring quite a bit once more. After finishing her meal, she leaves for the forest to continue her training.
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Claire arrives at the same clearing with the sun still rising, she binds the rope back around the tree and resumes her training from yesterday.
Up-left, down-left, up-left, down-right, down-left, up-right…
She continues this rhythmic beatdown on the dummy until the sun is hanging high in the sky, slowly getting more and more precise with her strikes, though there's still a lot to work on, even though it's only basic moves. With noon arriving, the time for a break has come as well.
Claire takes a seat under the canopy of the dummy tree and pulls out a waterskin from her sub-space. She drinks a big mouthful of water before releasing a satisfied sigh. "Heh, I think it's time to switch it up a little and move over to shadow fighting, I can feel that some of these simple strikes are already becoming habits, something that I'd rather avoid. The rope also doesn't seem to be doing too well after so many repeated hits in the same areas." She gets up and walks over to the rope to inspect the damage.
There are four main points of damage, with the area around each point showing clear signs of someone hacking at it, with the signs becoming clearer the closer to the center you get, even reaching the point of quite a bit of rope missing at the center. This can be attributed to Claire's precision increasing over time.
She's about to take the rope off the tree and put it into her sub-space, but she gets an idea to try something out, so, instead of taking the rope off the tree manually, she tries laying her hand on the rope and will it inside the space, which actually works. "Huh, this is neat, good thing I tested it, wait if I can remove something when it's attached to something else, maybe I can remove a whole tree when it's attached to the earth?"
"It's certainly worth a try," With that thought in mind, Claire approaches a tree that's under 4 meters wide and tall, including canopy, just to find nothing to happen. "Hm, I guess that it doesn't work… Wait, I forgot the fucking roots, they're of course too large for the sub-space, let's try again on a sapling or bush, that should work for the experiment." She looks around, not spotting any sapling in the vicinity, but there are a few bushes spread out, not only in the forest edge, but also in the clearing itself.
She decides on a sufficiently small one to experiment on. "Huh, I just realized that don't have anywhere to write my findings, welp, guess I'll just have to rely on good old memory for now. Anyway, here I go." She touches one of the leaves, and the bush is gone, leaving a hole in the ground where it once was. Some of the dirt surrounding the hole falls down a tiny bit, leaving something that looks like an impact-zone around the hole, though you need to look closely to see it. "Fuck yeah, this is nice, and also really overpowered to an extreme degree."
With some experimenting out of the way and a satisfied curiosity, Claire's mind is free to return to concentrating wholly on her training. This time there is no physical target, so it's time for her to utilize an ability that has come in handy many times when designing things back on earth, the ability to create a perfect 3D image in your mind and imagine it actually being a physical object in the real world.
Some might call this an advanced version of the eight-grader syndrome seen in some anime, others will call it something that doesn't make any mental sense, but no matter what it's called, it's an ability that's truly useful in many ways.
"Now that I've ensured that I can strike with at least a semblance of precision and control, it's time to move on to something that will give me more freedom in my training." The thing she chooses to imagine as a striking block is… a full body dummy in the shape of a human, nothing more, nothing less. At this point, it is as if her mind has split in two, one part aware that the dummy is nothing more than an imagination, with the other fully believing that it's a real thing, both minds do (luckily) work in tandem with each other.
"Alright, time to start training once more." She takes an offensive stance and starts attacking the dummy using the 4 moves she had been practicing up till that point. The amazing thing is how her body and mind is sure that the dummy actually exists, so, her muscles naturally work against the force of the sword once it collides with the dummy, creating the illusion that the dummy is actually physically in the world.
The process of her body stopping the attacks takes some time to really become good, as it had just gotten used to the tree stopping the sword. Each time the sword passes through the dummy's body while ignoring the dummy's resistance, her mind is stunned for half a second, until it remembers that it's just an imagined dummy. After spending a bit too long having her body learn to control the force of each swing and how to stop it mid swing (something that's really hard to do), she finally moves on to incorporating a stab and overhead swing into the random sequence.
Overhead, up-left, down-left, down-right, stab, down-right, up-left, down-right, up-left, stab, down-left, up-right…
She spends until the sun starts to set, just training these few basic techniques, adding in a defensive move or two in as well, just to get a weak familiarity with defensive moves as well. As she finishes off her training, she cancels the image of the doll and drinks some water before she heads back to the inn.
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Claire enters the tavern and sits down a free seat. In celebration of her nearly spending a week in this new world and her stay in the inn coming to an end after this night, she decides to spend quite a bit to order from the 'special' menu that Enya had mentioned. She finds out that such a meal is called a spirit meal and more importantly, they're really expensive, over 60 times as expensive as a regular dinner, and that's for the cheapest one. 'This is probably really irresponsible of me, but I want to try it, and this is a great opportunity.' She thinks to herself.
She orders an Ember-Lizard steak for 20 Big Copper coins, costing her around 2.26% of her remaining money. The steak arrives after some 10-15 minutes, it looks to be a cut from just under the ribs of the lizard, rice is served in a bowl besides it, and a sauce is in another bowl. The smell coming off the lizard enters Claire's nose, and her mind focuses on the steak instantly.
She carefully cuts the first slice of the steak and a rich taste envelops her mouth, the taste itself is only a little better than that of a steak on a normal restaurant on earth, but it has a certain something that brings it to a whole other level of quality. She pours some sauce on the steak, which just makes it taste even better.
As she continues eating the steak, she feels quite a bit of the exhaustion from the day leave her, and she's able to place what that certain something is, that being spirit energy, something that, besides bringing a great taste to the meal, also fills her body with a small amount of spirit energy, equating to around an hour of cultivation.
"Phew, that was a great meal, it really felt worth the price, but sadly that price is too high for me right now, I can't afford to waste money on it for now, hopefully I'll earn enough money to buy this whenever I want, once I join the sect." With a satisfied sigh, she retires to her room, where she enters the sub-space and cultivates for a few hours before she returns to her room. Satisfied with all the progress today, she heads to bed with a smile and is fast asleep, closing her eyes to the last night in the inn.
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Here's the discord link if you're interested, you might be able to get sneak peaks on new chapters before they're released
https://discord.gg/kxGA4dfmJv
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Author note, the god mentioned in the first few chapters is not a specific god, so, just forget that it was written with a big G, it doesn't mean anything, I'm debating changing it, but for now it'll stay like it is.
