After visiting several shops within the village, Yrre did all she could think of to make Elizabeth appear more girly. But, changing her personality was nigh impossible. In her words, "There are plenty of tomboyish girls around that feel content in their femininity, so you should just act like yourself. Trying to falsify your personality will be the greatest tell that you"re probably lying. Besides, even if you managed to succeed in changing your persona when confronting your family, you"ll have to keep up the act whilst juggling between being yourself when you"re around the dojo members."Having visited a local boutique and hair parlor, Elizabeth looked even more feminine than before. Finally opting to change the static long white hair she"d gained after transforming, Elizabeth took on a hairstyle that was traditionally feminine; the ponytail. Following Yrre"s sense of style, she bought several sets of "girly" clothes and currently stood adorning one such set. Wearing a tapered red sundress that was covered in frills, sandals, and earrings, Elizabeth looked like a proper n.o.ble lady.
Of course, everything Elizabeth purchased, whether service or good, was bought by exchanging some of the Magical Cores she had reaped from the animals in the forest. Sharktop Village, as a cultivator hub, didn"t use money from the various countries of the world. Rather, items infused with spirituality were the only things people bothered to trade. That being the case, Elizabeth only spent two Magical Cores as her purchases were rather easily supplied; one coming from a Beast Level 10 and the other Level 3.
Walking through the village, Elizabeth saw a couple interesting places she wanted to visit, but since the compet.i.tion was mere hours away at this point, she resigned herself to training. After returning to her room in the Inn, she cooked herself and Yrre another meal and proceeded to start using up all the Magical True Cores she"d earned from slaughtering King Stage wild beasts.
Now that she no longer had to worry about people asking questions, Elizabeth took out her Demonic Beast Egg and held onto it as she cultivated Inner Strength. Because her Yin Affinity had recently improved as she cultivated the [Darkyin Cultivation] method aboard the yacht, Elizabeth ability to improve Intelligence and Inner Strength now surpa.s.sed the speed of increasing her physical parameters with Internal Refinement. Although they were pretty close after her Ice and Fire Affinities also rose to Bad-tier.
With upgraded Yin Affinity, Magical Cores, an Intelligence Stat surpa.s.sing 350 after eating a meal created with the meat of a King Stage beast, and Inner Strength Conversion at Grade A now approaching Grade S, Elizabeth"s rate of absorption caused a visible vortex of energy to manifest as it drew a connection from the Cores in her hand to her Dantian. 90% of the energy was absorbed through her hands which held the core as she cultivated, but the absorption force was so strong that the remaining 10% of spiritual energy ripped straight through the air; a feat that only people with Seamless Qi Connections could accomplish.
Hours pa.s.sed, but before she had to leave once more to quench her bloodline, Elizabeth succeeded in using up all the Magical Beast Cores she"d acquired from her initial trip to the forest. With a surplus of millions, even tens of millions, of units of Inner Strength offered up by the various Magical Cores, Elizabeth easily rose her Inner Strength capacity to 1.5 Million units of Inner Strength.
Thereafter focusing to upgrade her Intelligence, as the energy from the Magical Cores overcharged the effects of meditation, Elizabeth felt her Demonic Beast Egg happily steal some of her cultivated energy for itself. It barely took half of a percent of the total energy fueling her growth, so Elizabeth didn"t bother with the egg. But after she finished bringing her base Intelligence to 300, she stopped meditating and began using sparring with Yrre in martial arts to digest the energy of the Magical Cores as quickly as possible whilst also training her physical parameters.
Naturally, even if she was unfamiliar with Muay Thai, Yrre still possessed the capacity to thoroughly destroy Elizabeth in hand to hand combat just as she did during swordplay. However, because Elizabeth"s main priority wasn"t in rising her Muay Thai skill, Yrre cut back much more strength than usual as Elizabeth body was under the stress of grandmist pressure and internal refinement whilst they sparred.
Once Elizabeth concluded using up all the cores available to her, having grown fond of this extreme method of improvement, she left to get some more Cores. However, before she left, the stingy la.s.s didn"t forget to inscribe a couple dozen Storage Enchantments. It truly pained her to leave behind the valuable corpses of the beasts she killed, and after her skills as an enchanter improved, she could easily draw Mid and even High-tier Mortal Grade Storage Enchantments to carry large and heavy beast corpses.
Bidding Yrre goodbye, Elizabeth left to gather more cultivation materials. It amazed her how different her experience was when compared to her first time surviving in the Forest of Beginnings. Thinking that just a week earlier she would have been grasping for any lifeline tossed at her when she had been placed in a territory of Beasts even lower level than the ones she was now effortlessly ma.s.sacring, Elizabeth sighed. As she would need to run for quite a while to reach the more dangerous parts of the forest, Elizabeth tried to communicate with P once again, "Ay! You still ignoring me?"
Behaving as if she hadn"t been ignoring her for the last couple days, P said, "Huh? No, why? What do you want?"
"Wh- Oh! You"re back! Great, I"ve been meaning to ask if you could tell me how much time I would get for picking Extra Break Time. I"ve been debating on which Bonus reward to choose, but before making a decision I"d like to know if the Break Time offered is worth the exchange for grandmist."
"Yeah, the Extra Break Time award for completing Main Quest #3 would be around an extra week. But, as you already know, a Mid-tier Pseudo Core made of fragmented grandmist bring the equivalent to 500,000 units of grandmist-type Inner Strength."
"Mhmm… Guess I"ll take the Extra Break Time then." After sending that final message P"s way, Elizabeth pulled up her rewards and accepted the week"s worth of Extra Break Time. She could easily earn non-grandmist-type Magical Cores with millions of units of Inner Strength locked away and slowly convert it to origin and then grandmist energy. So, the decision was hardly a difficult one to make. After all, Break Time for her was essentially time gained that would not apply to the other chosen of the Cataclysm. She"d essentially just stopped time for all the other chosen and given herself an additional week to do as she liked. Thinking about the absurdity of what that implied, Elizabeth more-or-less understood how the first seed of the Cataclysm managed to trek through 30 levels worth of cultivation in just a bit over the time she took to reach level 5…
After pa.s.sing the exit of the village, Elizabeth suited back up and let her various detection abilities work to protect her from any ambushes, as she sped through the rough terrain. A couple minutes later, a b.l.o.o.d.y angel of death descended on the forest; managing to escape the t.i.tle of mere "demon."
Doing all she could to efficiently use up her time, in addition to the various detection abilities Elizabeth used to safeguard herself, she also actively tried resonating with the world with the rest of her Affinities. Whilst most of her Affinities were Bad-tier or below, making her efforts seem futile, by releasing them to the world she could gauge whether there might be some beast that had cores with the affinities she trained. Moreover, Elizabeth was hoping she might catch wind of any potential spiritual items she might be missing out on; I.e. the Bismanthium she discovered in the Forest of Beginnings.
As a result, while her spree killing slowed down, most of the beast she hunted supplied her with Magical Cores of energy types she cultivated. The grand majority of the cores she found were either Fire or Ice-type as those were the only two elemental energies she trained in. Even after killing 50 King Stage beasts, she only managed to find three origin-type Magical Cores; two Yin and one aligned with Death.
Soon, even the dozens of Storage Enchantments she prepared were nearing the limits of their use as Elizabeth was simply too powerful for anything to struggle should she get serious. But before she filled the last of her prepared Enchantments, Elizabeth"s Lifespan Watch detected something she hadn"t seen before.
This time making it deeper into the forest than her first visit, Elizabeth"s death-seeing eyes picked up the sight of a towering congregation of near inextinguishable Death energies. It slowly started making sense why the only origin-type Magical Cores she found possessed either Death or Yin energy as the source of those beast"s cultivation became apparent to Elizabeth. As a pract.i.tioner of Death and Yin herself, Elizabeth decided to stop her killing to investigate as the source of all that energy would probably give her a nice little boost before the compet.i.tion.
However, to prepare herself for any potential danger, Elizabeth killed one more nearby King Stage Beast and replenished her reserves of Inner Strength with its Core. Keeping her spatial ripple sensing method operating as she recovered strength, minutes pa.s.sed with nothing making an attempt on Elizabeth"s life. Alas, there was no shortage of opportunistic beasts in the forest and the sight of a weak-looking fifteen-year-old cultivator meditating ignorantly in the heart of the forest made for several predators wishfully thinking they could get a free meal. Of course, after the fifth beast died miserably by the swift slash of her blade, King Stage Beasts that had begun to form intelligence got the hint and stopped bothering her.