Having just transmigrated,
It was a world that bore a resemblance to medieval Europe on Earth. In Lorist's memories, knights and lords were things from that era. He had even replicated a few sets of knight armor and sold them for a high price on TaoTaoWang.
The people here looked like Europeans — all white — but Lorist felt that this world was far more civilized than the dark, ignorant Middle Ages he had read about online. Well, perhaps the food was on par with medieval fare: oatmeal, black bread, and mashed potatoes with salt, day after day, was pure torture. He secretly wondered whether that chubby caretaker had been sneaking bites of his meals, which was how she had gotten so fat.
Harboring this suspicion, Lorist asked the caretaker — whose name was Cory — whether the menu could be changed.
Cory replied that this was simply the standard sickroom fare at the academy.
Lorist said then let's skip the sickroom food and just have normal meals.
The next day, Cory brought him black bread and mashed potatoes. The oatmeal was gone, replaced by a vegetable soup with exactly two leaves floating in it.
Lorist ate with tears streaming down his face, suffering just as much as before.
Unlike the white Europeans of his previous life, people here placed their family name before their given name — the same convention as Chinese names. In a book on the origins of nobility, Lorist had read that during the Dark Millennium, warriors who possessed the courage and fortitude to go out and slay magical beasts alone and return successfully would be granted titles by the tribal elders — names like White Mountain, Big Fang, or Flying Eagle — which were placed before their names. Over time, these evolved into family surnames.
The biggest difference was that Galentea had two moons. The larger moon was called Daflyn, silver-white, known as the Silver Moon Goddess, or the Goddess of Love. The second moon, much smaller, was called Sufina, blood-red, known as the Blood Moon Goddess, or the Goddess of Vengeance. At night, it hung in the sky showing only a sliver of red. In Galentea's legends, if Sufina ever revealed her full face as a complete moon, it meant that a great war was about to erupt in the mortal world.
In myth, both the Silver Moon Goddess and the Blood Moon Goddess were wives of Sigwa, the God of Light, the God of War, and the Sun God. Therefore, in Galentea, taking two wives was perfectly natural and universally accepted — provided you could afford it. Since both wives held equal status, the bride price for the second wife could not be less than that for the first. So for the sake of domestic peace, many people — even nobles — preferred to take only one wife to avoid trouble.
The more history books Lorist read, the more confused he became. The Galentea Continent was enormous, and human territory accounted for barely a third of it. The rest was wastelands, forests, or mountain ranges — places humans had never set foot in. Yet many history books, geography texts, and miscellaneous volumes all depicted maps of the entire Galentea Continent, nearly identical to one another. These maps, it was said, had been left over from the age of magical civilization, surveyed by those mages themselves.
Then there was the language and writing. The spoken language was the so-called Common Tongue — every human in Galentea spoke it. There were no dialects, just one single language. The written script was a system of pictographic letters, thirty-two in total, which were combined in groups of two or three to form diamond-shaped characters. It was not difficult to master. The books said that this language and writing system had been specifically created and promoted for humanity by mages, who themselves still spoke ancient Elvish, Dragon Tongue, Goblin Speech, and other magically imbued languages.
What surprised Lorist most was that many of the books depicted maps of the Galentea Continent on a round sphere. The people of Galentea all knew they lived on a planet — though they did not call it a planet, calling it instead a Plane World. Some books about magical civilization mentioned numerous so-called sub-planes, and these sub-planes likewise existed as round spheres floating in the Void.
Unless the legends about the mages were actual history, these maps and languages would be nearly impossible to explain. If all of it was true history, then it meant that Galentea's civilization had developed along an entirely different path — magic first, then
Lorist began to take an interest in Combat Force. He studied the handwritten manuscript of the Inferno Combat Force carefully, and through personal practice and experience, he came to understand that the key to Combat Force lay in blood circulation.
The people of Galentea called the convergence points where the body's blood vessels gathered "nodes." The human body had seventy-two major nodes, three hundred and sixty minor nodes, and one thousand and eighty special nodes. Combat Force was the process of sensing the ambient elemental energy, accelerating the speed of blood circulation, and directing the blood through a specific set of nodes according to one's will, forming a unique circulatory loop that generated a sensation of qi — granting explosive power, speed, and reflexes. This was Combat Force.
One thing that struck Lorist as remarkable was that Combat Force had elemental affinities. Much like the Five Elements described in the traditional Chinese medical texts he had memorized as a child — where skin, nostrils, lungs, and large intestine belonged to metal; sinews, eyes, liver, and gallbladder belonged to wood; bones, ears, kidneys, and bladder belonged to water; vessels, tongue, heart, and small intestine belonged to fire; and flesh, spleen, mouth, and stomach belonged to earth — Combat Force simply had more elemental categories.
The nodes on the left chest produced water-attributed Combat Force. The blood nodes on the right chest, encompassing the liver and gallbladder area, produced wood-attributed Combat Force. The Combat Force cultivated in the lower right abdomen was fire-attributed, the lower left abdomen produced earth-attributed Combat Force, and the left chest produced metal-attributed Combat Force. Additionally, a dozen or so major blood nodes running from the shoulders to the thighs produced wind-attributed Combat Force. There were also less common types such as blood-attributed and ice-attributed Combat Force.
In general, Combat Force cultivation involved using several major blood nodes to form a pentagram or hexagram structure, then, within that pentagram or hexagram, using several to a dozen minor blood nodes to establish a new blood circulation loop. By accelerating the flow of blood through this loop, the practitioner generated the qi sensation of Combat Force. Mastering this qi sensation — achieving the state where thought and Combat Force moved in unison — was the ultimate goal of Combat Force training. In this respect, Lorist felt a familiar similarity to the internal energy cultivation techniques of his previous life.
However, Combat Force cultivation had many taboos. Different elemental affinities could not be trained simultaneously. For example, if you practiced earth-attributed Combat Force, you could not take up any other elemental type. Doing so would not exactly cause qi deviation, but you would never be able to advance to the next tier — of that, there was no doubt. Furthermore, there were many types of Combat Force. Even the attributeless basic Combat Force had over a dozen variants. Along with military Combat Force, these were all low-tier styles, and the highest one could reach with any of them was the
The advantage of basic Combat Force and military Combat Force, however, was twofold: first, they had no elemental requirements, so anyone could practice them; second, they were simple to train, allowing the practitioner to sense the qi flow more quickly. The blood node configurations were mostly pentagram structures with few internal minor nodes, making it easy to master the movement of the Combat Force.
The Combat Force introductory classes currently popular at the academy typically began by teaching students basic Combat Force. Once a student reached the Black Iron tier, they would then choose a mid-tier or high-tier elemental Combat Force that matched their own affinity and continue training independently. However, most of the manuals available on the market could only train a practitioner up to the Silver tier. Manuals for mid-to-high-tier Combat Force that could train one to the Gold tier were exceedingly rare, and those that existed were worth a fortune.
Lorist was very interested in the Inferno Combat Force that this body had been practicing. He resolved to train it diligently. He was not particularly worried about the lack of Silver-tier training methods and above, because his memories told him that this body's Third Uncle visited once a year — partly to check on young Locke's condition, and partly to deliver a year's worth of living expenses and tuition. So once his Inferno Combat Force reached the Black Iron stage, he could have his Third Uncle bring the second half of the manual to continue training. But who could have imagined that after only three years, this Third Uncle would suddenly vanish without a trace, disappearing completely. Then, one year later, the Krisen Empire erupted into a succession war among three princes, a war that raged for six years. During that time, he and the family in the North lost all contact.
Lorist did not mind losing contact with his family. If anything, he was secretly pleased. The original owner of this body had been exiled in the first place, and now that communication had been cut off, no one would suspect him of being an impostor. The problem was that his living expenses and tuition had dried up. Food was not an issue — he could always bum meals from Fatty Maidov, who ran a snack stall at the academy gates every day. Failing that, he could eat at the academy, since tuition already included three meals — though the food was terrible. The real headache was the tuition itself.
At that point, Lorist had been at
Moreover, to better understand this world called Galentea, Lorist had enrolled in two additional subjects the previous autumn: pharmacology and magical beast studies. Subconsciously, he believed that the more he learned, the better he could integrate into this world. Fortunately, Lorist had transmigrated into the most prosperous and civilized city on the Galentea Continent, not some remote backwater village. That saved him the trouble of groping through the world blind — in a place like that, if his luck ran out, he could die in some forgotten corner and no one would ever know.
Each subject cost five to eight gold Forde per semester. Magical beast studies was manageable — it mostly involved looking at pictures and drawing diagrams, learning the characteristics of various magical beasts, which beasts could be killed by which methods, and which parts of a beast were useful and valuable. As long as one had a good memory, passing this subject was not difficult. Pharmacology, on the other hand, was another matter entirely. Not only did one have to identify various medicinal ingredients, but one also had to learn how to process them and ultimately synthesize potions — all of which required spending money on experiments.
Over these three years, Locke's Third Uncle would visit a few times, always buying Locke new clothes and tasty food, and leaving behind about thirty gold coins for tuition and living expenses for the year. Sometimes, if the caravan's business was good, he would leave a few extra. Lorist had never been a big spender. Apart from buying books, food, and hiring servants, he had no other expenses, and his savings amounted to perhaps twenty or thirty gold Forde.
Perhaps in the eyes of Fatty Maidov, who ran his little snack stall at the academy gates, twenty or thirty gold Forde was already an impressive fortune. But for Lorist, who wanted to continue his studies, it was barely enough for another year or so.
Since he did not want to leave Morant City, he would need to find a way to earn money. Lorist was taken by a few academy friends to the Mercenary Guild to register, becoming the lowest-ranked Bronze-tier mercenary. He then began taking on odd jobs — running errands for others.
The new design was novel, did not hinder movement, was easy to carry, quick to load and unload, and had a large capacity. It was beloved by mercenaries everywhere, and three to four hundred double-strapped leather backpacks were snapped up in no time. Lorist and his friends each earned around ten gold Forde from the venture. Seizing the momentum, they produced two or three more batches and earned another seventy or eighty gold coins.
Just as Lorist and his friends were preparing to open a leather workshop dedicated to manufacturing these backpacks, they suddenly discovered that the market was flooded with imitation double-strapped backpacks. Not only were there many different styles, but the prices had plummeted. Everyone cursed fiercely but could do nothing about it, and the idea of opening a leather workshop was abandoned.
This incident gave Lorist a small reputation at the Mercenary Guild and earned him some standing among his friends. In truth, Lorist had no shortage of ideas for making gold coins. He simply chose not to draw attention to himself and kept a low profile. The gold coins in his pocket were more than enough to live comfortably. During the day, he attended academy classes. In his spare time, he picked up small jobs at the Mercenary Guild. When the academy was on break, he and a few close friends would form a small adventuring party to explore dungeons and slay a few low-tier magical beasts. He led a leisurely, easygoing life, and in just two or three years, Lorist had become a seasoned mercenary veteran.