Chapter 10: Seeds.

"That was unexpected." She eventually said

"Cool." I replied, "What now?"

She stared back at me, as if wanting to chew my head off, but eventually she continued, "Look inside you now, where the core of your profound veins is."

And how should I do that?

It was pretty easy, actually; I used the energy as if it were my eyes; it was a pretty instinctual experience. There was one particularly dense array of energy channels inside my body; they seemed to be around as many as my major blood vessels. I would have to check if there were energy capillaries that I couldn't see, but that was for later.

I looked at the "heart" of this circulatory system and saw that it was not beating; it was a steady influx of power, which didn't really seem efficient to me, but that would be for later.

On the energy heart, or "core, as she called it, there were seven openings, similar to the ones distributed all around the channels.

Those were probably my entrances: "So, what now?"

"Those you see on your core are the Seven Gates; every time you open one of them, the Evil God Arts will increase by a realm, and at each realm of the Evil God Arts, there will be a corresponding formidable Evil God's Profound Skills. Do you understand?" She asked, a clearly smug expression on her face as she retold a bunch of, frankly, really embarrassing names.

I didn't understand how she could say "Evil God" so many times in a row without cringing; it was pretty funny to look at, like the delusions of a child, but real; I could feel it after all.

"Cool," I replied shortly, "how do I open them?"

"They're far easier to open than the profound openings; the gates belong to your profound veins, so if you want to open them, they will open! You just need to use your imagination, and all seven could open right now." She explained with a bright smile on her face.

"Nice, what do they do again?" I asked, still unsure how anything about these things could be worthy of that cringe-worthy name she kept giving them.

Just thinking about the name gave me shivers.

"If you open them right now, you'll explode and die!" She continued.

"Oh," I muttered, "so not nice then."

Did she just place a bomb in my body?

And here I was doing all of this to save her life!

"The Evil God arts are berserk in nature; the more you open, the greater the stress they place on your body. If you force them into a realm that you can't handle, they would either seriously damage your body or, in extreme cases, disintegrate it, shattering it into pieces."

"I won't open them, understood." I muttered, still unhappy about having a bomb in me, but at least it was a bomb that I would set off if it did.

That doesn't make it seem much better, actually.

"Ok, whatever," I eventually said, "is there a faster way to cultivate? Because between my job and all other projects, this would take a long time, I assume."

"It would indeed, hence why I would suggest carving a long period of time to exclusively cultivate; a few years would be long enough." She replied nonchalantly, as if a few years were little time to her.

"No, I can do it; can't I just cultivate while I also do other things?" I asked.

"That would be suicide!" She exclaimed back, looking at me as if I were insane, "Cultivation requires absolute concentration; a lapse in judgment for even a second can cause irreparable damage to your veins!"

"Huh."

That didn't sound good.

But a thought caught my mind. I thought back to my freezer; couldn't I just do a similar thing as then?

I condensed a spiral of energy, focusing on its intent of attracting the surrounding energy to itself, then placed it on my chest.

It did nothing. "Huh."

"What are you doing?" Asked the princess, looking at me with a weirded-out expression.

I had, after all, just interrupted the conversation we were having to draw an energy spiral; there was no way that she could think that I was alright in the head. "Just experimenting a bit; remember my freezer?"

Her eyes widened in realization, then widened some more at the terrifying implications that my being successful would imply: it would mean that everything she believed, everything that everyone believed to be absolutes, every decade of excruciating practice, was all actually pointless.

A pointless surpassed practice that a random boy from a random part of a random lower realm wanted to shatter.

"That's impossible," she shook her head, taking her away from those thoughts, "you can't take profound energy from your chest; you would have to intake it from your profound openings at the same time; you can't just replace everything with a passive effect." She replied, more to convince herself than to convince me.

There was no way that I could ever accomplish such a thing—to surpass the wisdom of millions, even billions, or even more cultivators who were far older and more accomplished than I was.

Unfortunately for them, their common sense didn't bind me.

I just detached the spiral like a sticker, willed it smaller, and slapped it on a very specific point on my neck, where one of my profound veins existed to take the surrounding energy inside.

It worked.

"Oh, so I have to apply them directly on the skin, got it?" I muttered.

Jasmine stayed silent and looked at me.

"But I still have to circulate it on my own; otherwise, it would just accumulate there, probably causing trouble since it is not fully integrated in my body." I continued.

"That's right!" She exclaimed, interrupting my thought process, "It is useless, so just take those things off and let's do things the normal way, the right way, as all our ancestors have done since the dawn of cultivation."

"Nah, I'm pretty sure I can circulate it while doing other things; it doesn't take much focus," I replied dismissively, unknowingly causing severe mental damage to the princess from another world. "Maybe I can make a rune that can circulate it in automatic... "But what shape should I use?"

Jasmine left, her body disappearing into the tattoo on my hand.

"Hey, where are you going?"

She didn't answer.

Months passed, and I soon reached what Jasmine called the last level of the Elementary Profound realm, whatever that meant.

Weird and cringy name aside, I had finally understood what cultivation was and what kind of fool I had been to dismiss it as I had been doing. I could now work better and faster, and I needed less sleep too!

I also got stronger, I guess, but that wasn't as important; who would ever need to break rocks?

I could break rocks now, but why would I?

One day, Jasmine asked me an unusual question.

Unusual for me, obviously, but apparently not so unusual for her, "I said, I need you to buy this princess a new set of clothes, including underwear, outerwear, shoes, and hair ribbons!" She said.

I looked at her, she looked at me, and I paled in terror. "Not the shopping, not here too!"

I was cursed; in every world I went to, women wanted to go shopping!

Couldn't they just be happy like me? I had even made a washing machine that made clothes super soft and brand new thanks to a combination of different runes. It was super fast, and I could just reuse the same clothes over and over again. Why couldn't she?

Women really didn't know how to be happy about the little things.

"I think you look great." I attempted to say this before being ruthlessly shut down by The Look, trademarked.

"I will be very sad if I have to keep wearing the same things every day; like you, I only have a couple of dresses, but what would my family say if they saw me?" She asked, faking being dramatic and heartbroken.

A few things she did learn from me: apparently, she was much more stuck up with a broom where the sun doesn't shine when I met her. "Fine, we can go later, happy?"

"Yeah!" She replied that none of the formalities she once used in her speech could be seen anymore.

But something buzzed me: "Jasmine, could I ask you a question?"

"Go ahead, disciple of mine; this princess will answer as best as she can!" She replied, purposefully boisterous for dramatic purposes.

"You mentioned your family; where are they? Don't you want to go back to them? I know that you can't get far from the green realm, but I'm sure I could at least go meet them with you. I'm sure they'd be delighted to know you're alright." I replied, seeing her chest deflate with every word that I spoke.

"Unfortunately," she replied, her voice now low and sad, "even if I told you, you wouldn't be able to go there; it's too far; you would need to be far more powerful to possibly take that journey; with your current strength, you would die just trying it."

"Oh," I replied, "I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm sure we can find a way!" I continued, keeping up the optimism.

The day I couldn't be optimistic in this world would be the day I found myself six feet underground.

"Don't worry, you'll become strong enough eventually, especially with your insane training method; I can't believe how efficient that is, but there was actually a reason why I came to this place; as far as I know, the Evil God left a part of his inheritance in this realm; one of the Evil God's secret grounds is in the eastern part of the Blue Wind Empire." She explained.

The Blue Wind Empire was incredibly big—far bigger than most, if not all, countries back on Earth.

Just that thought made me realize just how different this universe was from mine. Back there, a planet the size of this one would have such a powerful gravity that it would splatter everything that found itself on its surface.

I knew; I calculated the size of this world sometime before out of boredom; needless to say, it was big enough to dwarf the Earth. From there, I calculated the gravity, and from there again, I got to the universal gravitational constant, or as close as I could get to it; it was wildly different from the one in my previous universe.

I could barely wrap my head around the concept, but I digress.

"What is this inheritance about?" I asked the girl, trying to change the subject from her family.

"In the memories I received from the Evil God, I saw that he had left five "seeds" in five places of this continent after creating it, and he had also said that only those with his power would be able to find them, so we don't have to hurry as much; you should focus on growing in power before attempting to recover them."

"Gotcha, what do those seeds do, though?" I asked back, and she gave me a look that told me she still wasn't used to some of the slang that I used, but she still replied.

"I don't know with certainty, but what I know for sure is that they will be priceless additions to your arsenal, in one way or another." She explained, her eyes shining like a girl thinking about her crush.

Only in this case, her crush was an inestimably priceless item left by a god.

Fair enough, I figured.