Modern Awakening - A cultivation, LitRPG, apocalyptic novel

"Follow me?" Shen asked, surprised. "What for?" Didn't Alicia have her own goals?

"I trust you," she said. "And after Ken... I don't think I can trust anyone else anytime soon."

"What about bringing justice to your relatives? Wasn't that the reason you joined the tutorial?"

"I hate them," she said. "I hate them so much. But how will I find them? Can I magic it? If so, I haven't found out how yet. What about using the Alliance? Could that be done? Also no idea. Why not stay beside the one person I trust until I find them? One thing doesn't negate the other. Also, I don't know what awaits the Guardians back on Earth, but I know it'll be safer with you."

"Alright." He saw no reason to refuse her. If anything, she would be of great assistance to him. "I could use your help finding out where my clan was located at." Just because he couldn't mention the Eternal Empire didn't mean he couldn't talk about his clan. He was a cultivator; that much was obvious. Of course, he would come from a sect or a clan. "You can handle technology better than me. It should help."

She nodded. "Sure, I can help."

Silence befell them. Shen felt awkward; he wanted to talk to her, but he didn't know what to ask. As a Keeper of Knowledge in training, most, if not all of his conversations were about his functions. When he talked to others, it was usually in pursuit of a way to heal himself. He wasn't used to talking to others about them.

Thinking about it that way, he had been entirely self-serving, hadn't he?

"What's your favorite color?" Alicia asked.

He just stared, lost, at her. "Sorry?"

"Your favorite color. What is it?"

"Why would I have a favorite color?" That made no sense. "Colors are just colors."

She looked at him as if he was a mutated qilin. "Everyone likes one or two colors more than the others."

"I never even heard of such a concept. It's like asking... asking..." The idea of a favorite color was so useless, so small, so strange, that he had difficulty thinking of anything similar. "Like asking what's my favorite furniture. Or martial technique. Colors, furniture, and martial arts serve purposes. I use the one most suitable for each situation. That's all there is to them."

A new silence befell them before she said, "Well, mine is red. I think it's one of the reasons I like my fireballs so much. Your favorite food?"

"Hamburger," he replied at once. That made sense.

"That's only because you haven't tried pizza yet. Wait here, I'll grab some. If you leave, I bet you'll drown in people trying to talk to you."

He waited, then she returned with pizza—good enough but didn't have the same heavenly taste as hamburgers.

A very outlandish period of bonding through small talk followed.

"And that's the reason you should totally go for the learning ability upgrade," Alicia concluded.

After talking about things of little importance to know each other better, he had told her how much AP he gained in the middle boss and had in total. She had been astonished, then gave her opinion on what he should buy.

"I agree," he replied.

The advanced Path theory class was more tempting than the spear art. Having a Skill would give him a significant advantage at the spear art, but a Path was much more critical in the long term.

Yet, the learning ability upgrade would help with everything in his future, including his Path and his martial arts.

No reason to waste any time. "Buy E-tier learning ability upgrade," he said after sitting down.

| Purchased: Learning Ability Upgrade (E) | -500,000 AP

| Remaining AP: 144,964

Spending so much wasn't easy, but the wisp teacher had told him it was almost always a good idea to purchase the upgrade. He would trust it for now.

Like the last time he had purchased such an upgrade, he felt as if someone was swinging a heavy hammer against his skull. The sensation was followed by feeling like being electrocuted. His body trembled painlessly yet uncomfortably.

But there were differences too. The hammering of Shen's skull went deeper this time. Deeper than his bones. Something was changing, being forged in his very soul. That's also where he felt the electricity running through.

He wasn't sure he had ever felt his soul before, not this way. Achr had talked to Shen while Shen had been bodiless, but it had felt no different from his body. Now, it felt like something more. Different. Strange.

It was like being made of a mix of a slimy substance and fluffy feathers, a solid sponginess that offered no resistance if something wanted to go through, a hot coldness and a freezing warmth. Shen's mind simply wasn't good enough to understand the sensation.

At first.

His mind expanded—literally. It touched the boundaries of his soul and kept going without ever pushing them. He was growing inwards without moving anything already there out of place.

His soul, he realized, was limited in space, yet the space inside it was very flexible. Fluid. Unlike the "physical reality"—for lack of better words—where his body stood.

When the upgrade ended, he understood more of himself. He kept his focus on his soul, memorizing the feeling of it in case he wanted to return, then removed it back into his body.

Shen immediately noticed his body was a marvelous yet very underused tool.

His stats hadn't been pushed to the max of the E- tier yet because he lacked a worthy foe to accomplish that. He hadn't noticed it because he had been so focused on techniques and Concepts that he had failed to see the small details of himself, the links, how one thing connected to the other. He knew what E- stats looked like from fighting others with those stats yet had never thought to apply that perspective to himself and use it to find where his new limits lay.

Shen could see now he had been acting like a troll in a house of Whispering Porcelain.

It wasn't just his stats either. He could improve almost everything in himself.

As Zephyr had insisted, there was no finesse to his movements. As Combat had said, there was no optimal strength behind his strikes. As War had repeated, he had been underutilizing his five senses to perceive his surroundings and not controlling his power perfectly.

Shen could tell all of that just based on what he remembered of himself—and those memories came unbidden, instinctively; they were simply there, at the top of his mind, almost all the time.

He could instantly determine how to improve. The techniques he had memorized as a Keeper in training and the things the system taught him through the Skill just... clicked. They were so obvious. How could he not see before how to apply them and how they connected to each other?

But more importantly, how could he never have noticed how his Concepts were so much more than he had ever realized?

Boundlessness.

It was the first Concept he had touched, yet even being defined as a Concept defied its existence.

To be Boundless. Even being was a limitation it overcame by its very definition—a definition it also refused by its nature.

Could something truly Boundless ever be limited by something as pitiful as existence? Being Boundlessness was both to exist and not exist. However, it wasn't connected to the Void, for Boundlessness was still part of the Laws of Reality, and the Void was anathema to Reality. But it was close enough.

Shen should apply that to his martial arts. His battle rhythm was still fixed and predictable. He had learned with Zephyr to use less strength here and there, but he had never considered just... not attacking—not being—when he was meant to.

That would completely unravel his pacing and require a complete overhaul of his movements, yet it would bring him valuable unpredictability.

War.

Almost in the opposite direction of Boundlessness, War understood the inevitability of its limited existence. The Alliance had said there would be strife wherever two beings were, and War wholeheartedly agreed. When strife became big enough, War flourished.

Flourishing was a great analogy. Like a flower born in spring that found its end in autumn, War had a lifecycle, a beginning and an end. It wasn't boundless.

He briefly considered the possibility of two parties declaring war for an indeterminate time for their troops to train. The Concept of War refused to be compared to mere play. War required blood and sacrifices, was fertilized with death, grew with pain, and demanded an end.

War was transitory and pursued that ephemerality despite bringing about its own end with its every action.

Shen had to bear that in mind. War was not his ally. It would be satisfied by defeat as much as victory as long as it ended, thus fulfilling its existence.

His will should rule his wars at all times; draw from the wisdom of the Concept, yes, but never be governed by it again as he had half-allowed every time he pushed War Qi into his brain.

Combat.

Like War, Combat didn't try to be limited. Yet, unlike War, it didn't pursue its own end—or anything at all but itself. Combat was to fight.

In itself, it just was the thrill of exchanging moves. Without Shen and his Path to give it purpose, it held none. Shen had been using it to win, but pure Combat could also end in defeat... or not end at all.

It sought its own refinement to the utmost.

That had negatives but also positives. A perfected tool would be better than an imperfect one when the time came to use it.

As with War, his will should limit and guide Combat rather than let himself be ruled by it.

Sharpness.

What was a sharp blade? Something thin that could cut or pierce? How thin? Could its thinness be pushed to the extreme until it split atoms? Maybe.

Yet wasn't Sharpness something else too?

A sharp blade was defined by its ability to cut what it had been created to cut. It would be considered dull if someone failed to cut the desired target, even if it could cut other things.

Sharpness was relative to the object he wanted to split apart.

Sharpness, thus, wasn't an isolated Concept like Combat. It depended on the situation. It could be isolated like a physical Concept, but it would limit it too much.

That was obvious in how he could cut weak spots of armors and shields despite not being able to cut other parts of them. The target mattered as much as how thin the tip of his blade was.

To truly pursue Sharpness, he realized, he needed to understand Reality to find out how to properly split it apart.

Zephyr.

It was but a subtle touch of the slightest breeze. Unlike Sharpness, Shen improved its understanding of Zephyr right now by pushing it more toward physicality. He had been using it to relax his needless tense muscles, micro-correct his movement flaws, and help deflect attacks.

Why wasn't he using it to attack also? Only because something was delicate didn't mean it couldn't kill.

He had the perfect tool to push the air away from his spear and thus achieve greater speed as the air resistance decreased, but he had never even considered such a thing.

Now he did.

By upgrading his learning ability, Shen gained no new information from the outside. The new things he learned were but conclusions drawn frown what he already knew. Then the findings mixed to form new ones, and his knowledge expanded.

How long would he have taken to connect the dots of his knowledge without the learning ability upgrade?

It was also clear that doubling his learning ability from 4 to 8 was much more significant than doubling from 2 to 4 like the F-tier upgrade had done. He could only imagine what the D-rank upgrade could give him.

When the upgrade was over, Shen found himself lying on the ground like the last time. He sat up but didn't move further. He kept his eyes closed, focusing on the greater truths of his Path, making connections at a quick speed.

Meditating like a true cultivator.

He also cultivated his qi, using the better multitasking ability of higher ranks. The wisp teacher had also talked about it in the learning ability class. Shen couldn't recall using it ever since he had entered the E-rank, except to battle.

The multitask meditation with higher learning ability also let him find out things about qi. How to use it more effectively. The mysteries of energy and how it was better utilized. How it truly integrated with his body to improve him.

Shen kept going.

Alicia was training her fireballs while waiting for Shen to stop meditating. It was already the second day since he had started.

Mark woke up first.

She was sitting on the window's stool, focusing on her fireballs, when the unconscious boy sat up on the bed out of nowhere. She almost died of fright from the sudden movement, then nearly fell outside in her scare. She had to awkwardly grab the edges of the window or die in a very stupid way.

When Alicia recovered, she checked Mark, and he looked... sad. She could tell because she had seen the exact same semblance in her own face. It was a deep sadness that couldn't be put into words.

He looked at Shen first and kept staring for a long while. Then he sighed and looked at her.

The sadness became pain, and a shudder ran through his body. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked at her again.

"I don't know if I should thank or hate you," he said with a calm voice, then lowered his eyes. It felt wrong. It lacked all the energy and excitement of the previous Mark.

"What happened?" she ventured after a few moments of silence.

Mark didn't answer for a very, very long time. Tears started rolling from his eyes. When she had thought he wouldn't answer, he whispered, "I was delusional. Healing it unleashed memories I had blocked." He made a long pause. "My mother hated me, and I killed her when I was nine."

Alicia's whole body shivered. The words were terrifying enough, but on top of that, he had delivered them with a voice filled with the most despair she had ever heard. He looked at her and gave a sad smile, his face wet by tears and snot. "But at least I'm healed and free now, right?"

She didn't know what to reply, and he clearly wasn't expecting an answer. A new silence befell them until she finally said, "The Alliance doesn't heal emotional trauma. They don't consider it a disorder if I remember correctly. But a psychologist might help you."

He stared at her. Everything in that moment seemed to run slow. He nodded after a while, his tears lowering a little.

"Yes, I need help, don't I?" Mark said. Alicia had never seen anyone so vulnerable before. "I never let anyone in. But I'll try." Nodded to Shen. "Tell him his secret is safe with me." He took another deep breath. "Give up on the tutorial."

Alicia widened her eyes. Mark looked her straight in the eyes for a long time before saying, "Yes, I'm sure."

Light surrounded him.

When it disappeared, so did Mark.