The Undying Immortal System

By the end of the second month, both boys had seen significant improvements in their ability to cultivate.

After absorbing the knowledge I had stored in the memory orb, Mo gained a deeper understanding of the correct way to use the Earth Heart Mantra, and he was able to fix dozens of minor errors in his use of it without my guidance. This didn’t affect his rate of advancement much, so he was still only able to reach Martial Disciple 4 during this period, but there was an all-around improvement to his cultivation base that increased the purity of his qi by a large margin.

Liang’s improvements, on the other hand, were a bit more limited in scope, but they were much more significant. Absorbing the information from the orb allowed him to finally comprehend the basics of how to manipulate and cultivate qi. Since the orb didn’t contain any explicit memories of me actually cultivating the technique, putting what he learned from the orb into practice took him a bit of time, but by the end of the second month, he was able to reach Martial Disciple 2.

For this achievement, both boys were rewarded with an hour in the Affinity Room. They both eventually chose to spend this time raising their earth affinities, but while Mo had done so directly, Liang had needed convincing. He had originally wanted to spend the time raising his lightning affinity, and it was only after a passionate argument from Mo that he begrudgingly decided to go with earth as well.

Absorbing essence in this Rank 1 formation for only an hour didn’t have any noticeable effect on Mo, but it granted Liang a low nine-star earth affinity. Seeing this, I couldn’t help but feel that some type of feedback mechanism was needed to show a person’s improvements. I could easily see Mo becoming discouraged if he came here several times and didn’t see any noticeable improvements to his affinities.

In any case, while this short time in the Affinity Room didn’t have much of an effect on Mo, it had a transformative effect on Liang. Using his new affinity, Liang started rushing his cultivation as much as possible and didn’t give any thought at all to the purity of his foundation. After only a couple of days, he was already on the verge of his next breakthrough.

However, before that could happen, the three of us left our house to attend the second round of challenges between the normal and elite Disciples.

Throughout the second month, I continued to attend the combat training for the normal Disciples, and I kept a log of anyone who I felt I might want to recruit.

During this time, the instructor targeted several Disciples who hadn’t yet started to cultivate and decided to ‘remove’ them from the class. I did nothing to stop him from carrying out these ‘lessons’ as normal, but at the last moment, I would always block the killing strike. I had already let one kid die this year, and I wanted to avoid more bloodshed if possible.