The Five Elements

Just as Meng Tian was relishing in the experience of unlocking his second profession, his third clone from the ocean sent the core of a foundation establishment level octopus into the consciousness space of the main body. Meng Tian's soul body was holding the core in its hands and carefully looked through it to see if there are any difference with the cores of the beasts on land. He could only see that the difference was in size and color, where the beast core from the ocean was blue and much larger than the different colors of the cores on land which had smaller sizes in comparison.

Meng Tian had killed quite a number of beasts on land and the second clone which had gone for exploring the land areas of this world had killed much more. Because of this dual approach, he was able to collect a large number of cores from the land beasts, many having different colors ranging from brown which was the most common, green, blue, red and silver. The rarity of silver colored cores is the highest from the areas that he had been through. Now that he had gotten a core from the ocean which was blue in color, he suspected that the color of the cores were related to the element which the beast is more in tune with. But during his fights with these beasts, none of them employed any attacks using the elemental qi at all. This was quite puzzling as whenever he attacked a beast, it would only use its physical body and strength to counter him, never relying on qi.

Although, it was true that even after travelling all these days in the forest, the second clone had yet to encounter any beasts above the body forging level. So, maybe only when the beasts reach the level of power of qi condensation that they can manipulate the surrounding qi for attack or defense... until then only physical body seems to play the major factor. The second clone also came to the conclusion that he was moving deeper into the forest area as the cultivation level of the beasts was increasing gradually. However finding creatures with higher cultivation levels was much easier in the ocean where the third clone even sent back the core of a foundation establishment level creature. This must be the reason why humans had been able to still keep their place at least on land preventing the extinction of their race. It also stands to reason that the beasts with higher cultivation levels must have been hunted again and again to keep their population in check by the human race.

The first thing that his main body did was to divide all the cores that he had collected so far along with his clones into different colors. It was reasonable to assume that the colors relate to their respective elemental affinities. If that really is the case, then Meng Tian could easily unlock the remaining two elemental affinities of the five elements by devouring the cores. Although he knew that it could be dangerous and very painful for his soul body to devour these cores, he had no intention to stop at all. So, the soul body took a small size brown core from the pile inside the consciousness space and swallowed it whole. He felt a clear pain through his soul but he was able to endure it very well due to his previous experience of when upgrading his blood clones into blood carnage clones.

[Consumption Criteria not met... Switching to Atomization...]

[Atomization Complete... Initiating Soul Burn...]

[Elemental Conversion Complete...]

[Talent Unlocked: Elemental Earth Affinity]

[Energy Points +30]

[Elemental Earth Affinity Lv.1 (0/10)]

It did not take long for his soul body to gather brown elemental essence from the dark surroundings inside the consciousness space and swallow it. No apparent changes were visible on the soul body once it did so. Meng Tian however did not stop at this and took a silver colored core and swallowed it, repeating the same procedure again.

[Consumption Criteria not met... Switching to Atomization...]

[Atomization Complete... Initiating Soul Burn...]

[Elemental Conversion Complete...]

[Talent Unlocked: Elemental Metal Affinity]

[Energy Points +20]

[Elemental Metal Affinity Lv.1 (0/10)]

The good news was he was able to gain another elemental affinity for metals. However, a significant change happened to his soul body. Just as the soul body gathered the silver elemental essence and swallowed it, a burst of five different colors came out of its body and formed a huge floating circular wheel inside his consciousness space. Five different colors representing the five elemental affinities started to slowly rotate in a circular fashion. Glowing metal was following the flowing water which lead to the lush green leaves followed by a raging fire leaving a barren brown land. The five elements- Metal, Water, Wood, Fire, and Earth respectively, kept complementing each other to form a virtuous cycle which kept increasing its speed of rotation.

Once its speed reached some limit, the cycle disintegrated by itself into five separate colors again and rushed to merge with the soul body. And a five-colored wheel appeared at the center of the chest of the soul body surrounding the black dot which represented his affinity towards the special talent- death. However, just as this cycle was formed, the black dot in the middle started to squirm with unrest trying to break out of the five colored circle. But the golden aura surrounding the soul body due to his heart cultivation and the runic characters on the soul body due to the beige lotus in his dantian glowed at the same time and completely suppressed the black dot. Hence the soul body was unaffected and in total control.

Meng Tian's main body now had access to the five elements that made up his surrounding qi. Even now, he had not tried using his elemental qi to attack anything, because he never had the need to. But there was no doubt that he could make use of the elemental qi around him to create say water spears, fire balls, earth walls, etc. But the point to note was that without a viable battle technique written down for him to read or see anyone demonstrating the skill, he could not get any of the above skills to show up in the skill column of his status screen, just like how he could fly or has spiritual sense... all of which are not shown as skills in the status screen.

So, upon using these skills on his own, the qi consumption, attack range, area, strength, etc. all of these parameters need to be factored in. Because just because he can do them, doesn't mean he can't get tired. Meng Tian had a hunch that once he could get the right mixture of all these parameters, these skills would directly appear in his status screen. But he just had not taken the time to do this yet. On the plus side, if he could really make this possible, creating new skills that require elemental qi, he could write them down himself and give them to the human race pioneering in a new era of elemental mages... On the other side, if these skills are already there, he could just ask his master or rob them from villainous organizations like the Green Devil Cult, etc.

Anyway, he also found out that the number of energy points that he received upon swallowing these cores corresponded to the cultivation level of the respective beasts. For example, if he swallowed the core of a Body Forging Realm beast, then he would get anywhere in between 10 to 99 Energy points.

As he was thinking all of this, it also just happened to be the time when his soul body finally completed all of these processes that had happened to it once the Earth and Metal Elemental Talents were unlocked. Now that he knew he could get energy points by consuming the beast cores, he did not hesitate to gulp all of the stock that he accumulated over the past week courtesy of his second clone which was wandering in the depths of the forests.

Once he got tired of doing this, he scanned the surroundings once again and saw that Lin Caihong and Chen Shanyuan were still on the lookout and the others were asleep. To be honest, there were not many surprises till now in this camp. Although all the other students had a fair share of troubles finding the Saccharine Lilac Lilies and encountered some beasts, no team was having more trouble than Meng Tian's. This was due to the fact that Meng Tian would not give his team a break at all... he would lure the beasts left and right throughout the day, sometimes even at nights and made them fight intense battles... he was basically training them till they dried out completely. On the bright side, he would also lead them to many of the lilies in the surroundings. So, his team had not yet lost their minds.