The Undying Immortal System

With 100 stages to complete, I needed to be extremely efficient with my use of both qi and time. I had reason to believe I could complete 50 in one day, but I didn’t believe for a moment that the second 50 would be as easy as the first 50.

My quickest and most stamina-efficient way to take down the Trial’s constructs was by piercing them with a thread of my wood-based spirit fire. My most qi-efficient and least mentally taxing way of taking them down was bashing them apart with the ball end of my staff.

Because the Trial’s environment contained only pure earth qi, I was able to cultivate while moving and fighting without needing to worry about accidentally drawing impurities into my body. To use that to my advantage, I started fights by blasting my enemies with spirit fire until my qi reserves fell under 10%.

Qi Recovery Pills were most effective at these low energy levels, so whenever my qi recovered to more than 10% of its maximum capacity, I sent out a spirit fire to quickly destroy another construct.

While waiting for my qi to recover, I fought against the golems using my staff. It took far longer to destroy them like this, but by switching between spirit fire and physical power, I was able to make swift, constant progress through the initial stages of the Trial. The only minor difficulty was maintaining my qi-empowered muscles at such low energy levels, but I was able to quickly adapt my combat style to account for this handicap.

In half a day, I had advanced all the way to stage 30, setting a pace slightly above what I had expected. Once I reached stage 40, though, things slowed down dramatically. Instead of simply needing to destroy my opponents, new challenges presented themselves.

At first, these changes only concerned the terrain of the arena. For example, on some stages, large pits and high cliff walls separated me from my enemies. However, after stage 60, there were also formations I had to be wary of.

These new impediments were annoying. I was skilled enough with Grandmaster-level formations that they didn’t have a chance to stop me, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that they slowed me, and I couldn’t afford to be slowed down.

At the end of the first day, I had slightly surpassed my goal of stage 50, making it to stage 54. At the end of the second day, I had made it to stage 90. From there, my progress slowed to a crawl as I had to expend nearly all my energy on each stage to deal with the terrain, formations, and dozens of opponents.