by Pegaz
“Take me for an example. I can’t remember how many creatures and humans I’ve killed, and because of that, I can only trust you and your mother.
“I always assume that I’ve got to kill the people I interact with one day. I don’t trust the villagers. Hell, even the knights in the kingdom and the king are untrustworthy in my eyes. If it wasn’t for you and your mother, I would be really lonely, and loneliness can cause people to spiral into dark thoughts… especially when they’ve witnessed as much as I have.”
As John finished his sentence, the bear started to moan as it tried to get up. John stood up, walked over to the bear and kicked the back of its head, knocking it out. Looking over at Kelly, he gestured with his hand for her to walk to him. When Kelly reached him, John handed her his nano short sword.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, taking the sword with hesitation.
“I never leave home without it—you just don’t see it.” John tossed Kelly a wink. “I stole the metal from that friend’s family after the head of the family tried to arrange a marriage between me and his daughter. When we arrived in this kingdom, I borrowed the king’s blacksmiths to create it.”
John knew that she was actually inquiring about where the sword was kept, but he couldn’t answer her truthfully. Instead, he pretended to get the meaning of the question wrong and answer half truth about where he got the sword in the first place and hoped she didn’t care enough to ask a second time after correcting his feigned mistake.
The nano short sword he handed to her was a spare he created years ago after losing his original in an explosion during a fight at the Adventurers’ Guild’s auction house. However, unlike the original, this one wasn’t created with a fingerprint rune.
As John let go of the sword, he could see Kelly losing focus. He clapped his hands together in front of her face to bring her focus back to him.
“You lost focus for a while then. What were you thinking about?”
“The weight of the sword… it’s much heavier than I expected,” Kelly answered.
“You’ll get used to it in no time, but I want you to always remember something.” John knelt down and stared into her eyes.
“The sword is only a tool. It will never move, think, or act on its own. When it kills something, that’s because the wielder used it to kill—the sword didn’t have any say. Never think that you’ve got to use it to kill something just because you’ve got it.
“While it’s a weapon designed to kill, it can also be used to save lives, too. Its purpose is up to the wielder to decide.”
John then waited for Kelly to come out of her thoughts. After a few minutes, Kelly looked at John and told him that she was ready to kill the bear.
John gestured for Kelly to walk in front of him, so she would be standing over the bear’s neck.
With the sword in her hand, John could feel Kelly’s heartbeat quicken as he held her shoulders.
“Relax. The bear is unconscious, so it won’t feel any pain even if you don’t kill it in a single swing.”
He stepped back and watched Kelly as she kept staring at the sword. It would be a lie to say he wasn’t curious to know what she was thinking at this point, but he knew she wouldn’t tell him even if he asked.
John watched Kelly lift the sword above her head as she prepared to strike.
She then swung the sword at the beast’s neck, decapitating it with little effort, which surprised her.
I hope she doesn’t ask how we sharpened the sword. I don’t know how to explain that the sword has the molecule rune in it, making it able to slice through anything without much effort.
After killing it, she dropped the sword and stared at the bear. John didn’t know what was going through her head, but he could only wait for her to come to terms with her actions.
Half an hour later, John showed Kelly how to skin the bear and separate the meat from the bones. When they were done, they made their way home to cook the bear meat as a way to celebrate her first kill.
On their way back, John made sure there was no blood on her clothes as he made Kelly use a herb to hide the smell of blood. When Kelly asked why she needed to do this, John asked Kelly not to tell her mother that she killed a bear as he’d eventually tell her when the time was right. Kelly agreed.
Before they knew it, another fifteen years passed by.
Chapter 12: Changes
Fifteen years was a long time, even to most immortals.
Kelly had grown up and was almost twenty-one now. She still looked a lot like Sarah, but she was a bit taller and retained some of John’s features, too. However, John and Sarah looked a lot older now, but that was because their nano armour was altered to help them age. Without it, Kelly would’ve noticed that something was off since the villagers were growing older as well.
Their skin loosened a little, John created bags under his eyes, and Sarah eventually created a few wrinkles on her face under protest. They also added a few age spots on their arms and legs and slowed down their pace whenever they worked.
Throughout the years, John made sure Kelly kept up with training while also increasing the difficulty. He taught her how to handle various weapons, including secret specialty weapons used only by the most skilled assassins.
The village had also transformed. Thanks to John and Sarah, it had grown into a bustling town. People trickled in from all over because of Sarah’s medical knowledge and John’s training courses, both of which paved the way for hundreds of children to achieve their dreams of becoming knights.
Unfortunately, even with Sarah’s medical skills, the old man who was in charge of the village died a few years after they arrived.
He only saw the village prosper for a little while before he fell ill. Bedridden, he wasn’t able to see the village transform into a town. When he died, the whole village—including those who just moved here—attended a simple funeral for him.
The rest of the people John taught over the years were those who didn’t want to become knights but still wanted to carry out a knight’s job. They used that training to protect the town from wild animals, deal with the criminals who passed through, and go hunting to supply the town with food.
The knight who lived in the village before them never came back. This was due to the fact that John kept going to the king’s castle every two years to give the king a fright, causing the knights to stay at the capital for the king’s safety.
While passing through the capital, John had manipulated the person in charge using an Information Sphere. He planted new memories into the man’s head, making him believe that he had assigned John’s village with a new knight—one no one had ever heard of. If questioned, the man would simply state that it was a new knight. He was able to provide a full description of the knight’s background, abilities, and training if needed. To make it seem more realistic, he even made sure that the information showed that he joined up to become a knight with two others.
John’s bi-yearly journey kept him busy, but not as busy as Sarah. She was able to strengthen the cells throughout her body in a little over five years, pushing her to Rank 8.
It then took her about six years to grow, strengthen, and compress her soul and enter Rank 9!
Like John, she obtained a rank one soul which was an inch in diameter after compressing it to the limit, and her system showed that she also had the limit of 100 billion Soul Power units.
Sarah was a Rank 9, level 6 immortal who could create vitality anywhere inside her brain and organs. The rest of her body was still a challenge, but it was only a matter of time until she could create vitality throughout her whole body and enter level 9.
The Toxic System:
Name: Sarah
Title: Saint
Age: 73
Toxins (Brain): 10T
Toxins (Body): 48.38T
Soul Power: 100B
SP: 0
Rank: 9
Level: 6
Molecule Storage: 62,476
However, even a
fter treating all the patients in this town, she still didn’t generate another Saint Point. She still had no idea how they were generated and believed it was a one time thing. Though, if she did manage to generate another Saint Point, there were only three levels left which she’d get in no time at all, so it would be useless. Regardless, it would still take her a few more years to gather the Toxin Power needed to completely fill the body counter.
By this time, John’s system only had one skill left to complete, too. Six months after Kelly’s first kill, the epic Vitality’s Neurons skill was completed.
John could feel vitality being created from his soul. The vitality travelled throughout his brain, causing him to unconsciously focus more and feel more alive.
After that, he decided to get the unique Conversion skill which took another year. When he unlocked that skill, his system updated to reflect the new value.
Toxin Pool (Brain): 10T
Just like the description said, it changed the last four units of Life Power into Toxin Power.
For the next eight years, he worked on upgrading Immortality’s Vitality skills.
The first Vitality’s Organ skill needed two years and eight months to complete, and the second skill’s required time doubled to five years and four months, equal to eight years collectively.
The next four skills after those two would’ve needed a hundred and sixty years to complete!
John had planned for this situation, though, as he had four skill points saved up from killing beastmen.
That was when he entered Rank 9, level 9. This was the top of the immortal world and the only people above him now were the Transcendents.
After that, he wished for good luck once more as he placed his Idlers into the epic Vitality’s Organs skill, hoping it would only double the time and not triple or quadruple it.
Misc List:
*EPIC* Vitality - Idlers 2160/2160, Neurons - 1/1, Organs - 0/1, ??? - 0/1 (unlocks at Vitality’s Body level one), Time - 2y
John was in a good mood for a long time after realising it only doubled the time amount like it usually did.
When that skill finished two years later, the new skill’s time was doubled again. John expected that the name of the new skill would be the same as the Immortality skill, and he was right.
*EPIC* Vitality - Idlers 2160/2160, Neurons - 1/1, Organs - 1/1, Body - 0/1, Time - 4y
Now, there were still six months left for the epic Vitality’s Body skill to complete, but John had a problem that had been bothering him since it happened a few days prior.
Welcome to the Idle System 9.9.
Name: John
Title: Demon
Age: 73
Idlers: 0/2160
Skill Points: 0
Toxin Pool (Brain): 10T
Toxin Pool (Body): 60T
His Toxin Pool was completely full! That meant his mind parts were free from doing the absorbing and merging techniques, but more importantly, it meant the Demon inside his head had stopped the breathing technique.
The only upside was that the Demon had remained quiet since he became free.
John didn’t know if it was plotting to take over his body again or not, but it had already affected him—any decision he came up with was double or triple checked to make sure it wasn’t the Demon whispering ideas in his mind again.
Sitting at his kitchen table, he created runes as he worried about the Demon every now and then. For the past decade, he had been experimenting with the blank runes inside of his Storage Space because he wanted to create a sealed space using runes, like what they did to trap him back at the Adventurers’ Guild’s auction house. Of course, he would save these runes for when he left the planet.
It took this long because the experiments were only done in his spare time since, during the day, he had to train the people who paid him to do so.
During the evenings, Kelly occupied the house, so he couldn’t do it then. And at night, Sarah would curiously poke and prod him about what he was doing, forcing him to travel into the jungle to work on his experiments when he wasn’t busy.
He learned that the basic structure needed for the runes to work was a cube, but other shapes could be used if enough runes were available. Over the past decade, he had changed the drawings he put on the runes to strengthen them.
There were plenty of limits to these runes, though.
For one, you couldn’t add runes to the structure after they had been activated. This meant that they were pretty much useless in an actual fight since predicting the enemy’s movements wasn’t fully possible. They were only useful in a fight if they were deployed on a much larger scale to make sure the enemy was trapped the first time. For this reason, he used millions of the mythical blank runes he had bought.
He had run out of the blood needed for his experiments a while ago, and every few weeks he had to hunt the creatures that were ranked SSS back on Nobody Sect’s private planet for the beast’s blood to continue experimenting. When he tried replacing the blood with an immortal beast’s blood on the blank rune, hoping that would strengthen the result, the blank rune disintegrated into nothing.
As John was creating another mythical space sealing rune, he suddenly heard his system go off.
Ding!
The noise caught him off guard because he knew there was only one skill left and it still had another six months until it was finished. It surprised him so much that he dropped the rune he was working on.
He opened up the system to check what happened and was shocked beyond belief.
Chapter 13: The Finished Task
In front of John were three pop-up boxes from the system. Two of them were large squares which were side-by-side, and the third box was underneath them with flashing words in the centre.
In the left box was a map and on the right was a picture of mountains, rivers, and a large forest which did not match up with the map.
John studied the words in the small box.
Analysis complete!
It all came back to him.
Back at the auction house, he bought a map which was said to be from an eon ago and could possibly lead to transcending.
After he won the map in the auction, he threw it inside his Storage Space and the system scanned it. It then began comparing the terrain of all the other maps it had scanned to the old map’s contents.
But this all happened over thirty years ago!
No wonder I couldn’t think of why the system would go off. It started this task thirty-two years ago and I was more concerned about fighting those class one enforcers the Adventurers’ Guild sent after me.
Why did it take so long? Why does the map on the right look so different?
John noticed an arrow on the right side of the map and tapped it twice, turning it into a world map.
He still couldn’t recognise the planet, so he pressed the arrow again to turn it into the 3D universal map.
The planet itself was located at the very most centre of the universe! It was almost as if the universe itself was created around this planet.
Taking note of the location, he motioned to close the pop-up box as he wasn’t going to do anything until after he made sure Kelly became an immortal. However, as he did so, he noticed some writing on the aged map and he recognised it!
The origin language! The bounty guild leader said it was the first language of the human race.
John retrieved his bounty guild badge and compared a few letters, and while they were not the same, it was close enough to say it was the same language.
In six months’ time, after Kelly becomes an immortal, I guess I’m going on an adventure again.
As he finished thinking, he heard the door open and quickly put away the badge. When he turned around, he saw an angry Sarah glaring at him, arms crossed.
“What?” John asked.
“I didn’t say anything all this time because I thought Kelly was too young and she needed to focus on her training and studies,” Sarah answered, “but now, e
ven I think you’ve gone too far!”
John opened his mouth to speak, but Sarah stopped him by smacking his chest with her hand as she scowled.
“The family of the boy who was interested in Kelly disappeared last night and I know it was you!” she said in a hushed voice in an attempt to keep others from hearing.
“Since we came to this village, the boys interested in Kelly wouldn’t try to make anything of it because they feared you. Some of the families coming to live here have sons who didn’t know about you, but they have always disappeared before they could make a move!
“This is like the fiftieth time already! What do you do with them? I know you don’t kill them!”
“How do you know I don’t kill them?” John asked.
“So you admit you got rid of them?” Sarah half-shouted.
“Oh, so you wanted me to ask that question, then confess I did something else? You’re either getting trickier, or I’m slipping.” John sighed before continuing. “They’re in the other kingdom with new identities, memories, and the like.”
“So anybody who thinks about Kelly as a love interest is suddenly kidnapped, brainwashed, and moved by you? Am I missing anything?” Sarah asked.
“I always give them a bit of money, that’s how generous I am.” John smiled.
“That’s not the point! Do you want Kelly to live in isolation, separated from the rest of the world, forced to never find anybody to love?” Sarah became angrier the more she thought about it.
“Not really,” John answered. “It’s just that none of the boys on this planet are good enough. If they want to even think about dating my daughter, they’ve got to be stronger than me so I know she’ll be safe. That’s the minimum requirement!”
Sarah gawked at John’s comment. It took her a while before she realised John wasn’t kidding. “Are you crazy? Only the transcendents are stronger than you at this point! That’s basically telling me you don’t want your daughter to date!
“What’s wrong with you? Since we’ve come to this town, it’s like you’re becoming more and more overprotective of not just Kelly, but me, too!
