Living Life As A Game: Through And Through

"Ok?" To this rather lacking conclusion, Sun did as Elizabeth asked before returning back her phone. Elizabeth took her phone back, then, after Sun dressed back up and Elizabeth wiped the streak marks left over from her dried up tears, the two of them walked over to the front door.

Outside the door, Aitd and Jane were having a conversation, but they stopped as Sun left the room and Elizabeth waited for Jane to come in. Atid had stopped eavesdropping on Sun and Elizabeth after he sensed Jane approaching, thus he was a little confused as to how the previously infuriated Elizabeth calmed back down to almost completely unfazed; the usual atmosphere she carried around herself.

Jane excused herself from the small talk she and Atid engaged in and once more the doors to Elizabeth"s room were shut. Now Left alone as foster son and father, Atid turned to the still perturbed Sun and asked, "Um… Is there anything you want to talk about, or..." He very much wanted to understand why two of the more important people related to him started fighting since he hadn"t eavesdropped enough to make out what the root of the problem was.

Sun looked at his foster father and said, "Actually there is something I want to ask about..." The two then started talking as they walked back down to the training area on the first floor.

…

After closing her doors, Elizabeth was handed a scroll, of all things… She was just about to question Jane of what exactly it was she had just been handed when a notification from her status functions answered her question before it could even be voiced.

[Alert! Cultivation Manual Detected!!!

Would you like to copy its contents and store them metaphysically in your soul? Yes/No]

Elizabeth looked at the notification with a sort of questioning intent. She didn"t really need another cultivation technique first and foremost because she had more than enough things pending on her attention and waiting to be accomplished as is; it wouldn"t be worth studying ice energy as the benefits would not make up for the lost time. Then there was the fact that Elizabeth already took on fire affinity which would logically make studying ice an exercise in futility. Lastly, now that this had become a matter concerning her soul, Elizabeth wouldn"t make any kind of decision without first consulting with P, as she didn"t really know if there would be any negative side effects.

Thus, even though Elizabeth was still a little annoyed with how her last interaction with P went down, she still asked, "Are there any downsides to storing the cultivation technique in my soul? Oh and what else can I store in my soul through status functions?"

P responded, "There are no "downsides" to storing information in your soul. At least not at the moment, considering the quality and quant.i.ty of information that specific cultivation technique contains. The soul is a powerful instrument capable of absurd feats, even more so for someone like you who had a *** ***** implanted in your Soul Land. So for now, all Mortal Realm Cultivation techniques and even most Spiritual Realm technique can be seamlessly integrated into your soul.

The purpose of that notification popping up was to allow you in choosing what kinds of things are memorized. It would really suck for you if everything was memorized as worthless contents of your everyday life don"t need to be recalled at a moment"s notice.

As for what else you can store in your soul, practically anything you can perceive would have to fit in that list. Only, because your still not that far into the path of cultivation, you can"t actively use your soul and thus need the status functions to help you out a little. Finally, I can start to actively help you out as my power is what will be galvanizing your soul into temporarily activating eidetic memory."

"Mhmm… So, I can memorize anything I want? Does it have to relate to cultivation, or can I also use it for some "miscellaneous" activities?"

"...You can call out your status if you want to record your senses, or, if what you want to memorize is already in a stored format, like script on a paper or music from an mp4 player, you can call out another object"s status, like you"re technically doing now for the scroll, and the option to record will also be present. I will only be alerting you of recording option in the future when you come across things that I believe you might want to record."

"Anything goes? Heh..." Elizabeth"s eyes narrowed in madness as she thought of becoming an intellectual powerbomb, but after accepting the request for recording down the cultivation manual and learning how exactly the recording process worked, she once again felt the bittersweet slap that was reality.

After she activated her eidetic memory as P called it, nothing happened initially. Elizabeth more or less expected for the contents of the Manual to just poof into her brain, just like they did when she absorbed grimoires provided by the rewards functions. However, seconds pa.s.sed with nothing happening, so Elizabeth opened up the scroll thinking that maybe after she personally saw the contents, they would then follow suit and magically stay in her mind.

Alas, it didn"t work that way either… Elizabeth asked P what was going on and the response P, in turn, gave her left her defeated. It turns out, she would need to read through and see the entirety of whatever it was she was recording, and only the contents she wished to remember would stay with her subconscious like the other pieces of knowledge she had previously earned.

So, Jane had to sit there and wait as Elizabeth read through the entirety of her cultivation technique. Not that she cared, after all, she came in with the full intention to let Elizabeth read through the contents of her cultivation technique and hopefully lead her to a better understanding of whether the technique wasn"t a good fit for her or if she"s been cultivating wrong all this time.

For the first time in a while, Elizabeth"s past obsession with gaming was starting to pay of as one of the benefits she possessed from her pitiful past lifestyle was the near superhuman reading speed she managed to develop. Without that inhumane level of speed, it would be a wonder how she"d be able to complete all the games in the open market and confidently claim to have aced most underground games as well.

Now, reading speed and comprehension weren"t the same thing as even though her actual full speed reading ability reached near AI levels of absurdity, she still had to slow down to 70-80 that full speed to actually understand what she was reading. However, with both eidetic memory and her Timeworn Eyes working their magic, Elizabeth"s reading speed could probably clear an encyclopedia in minutes.

As Elizabeth etched the contents of Jane"s cultivation technique into her soul, another nasty frown threatened to toss the world in chaos. "What the f.u.c.k? Which idiot designed the routing of the cycling process? Why are all the energy release points concentrated on the Dantian? Is this really a cultivation technique?" The more she read, the worse her mood devolved.

Elizabeth couldn"t accurately judge the mantras and mnemonic devices the technique used to generate and connect to ice energy, but when it came to the design of the techniques pathways within the body she found hundreds if not thousands of flaws each more devastatingly brutal than the last.

When she finished reading through the entirety of the scroll, she couldn"t help but shake her head in disapproval. Jane noticed Elizabeth"s actions, so she worriedly asked, "Did you figure out what"s wrong?"

"What"s wrong? f.u.c.k! You tell me what isn"t!" Elizabeth almost followed through with her urge to rip the scroll to pieces and burn it to ashes with her furnace. But, she stopped herself and politely furled the scroll before giving it back to Jane.

Seeing the confusion on Jane"s face, Elizabeth expounded on what she meant. She said, "If I were you I"d go to whatever b.a.s.t.a.r.d gave me that technique and demand justice. I mean seriously, this can"t be the cultivation technique you"ve been practicing, right?" It seems like history was repeating itself as Elizabeth didn"t immediately explain what was wrong and instead commented with the most ambiguity possible…

"Huh? Exactly what makes you think this technique is so bad?" Jane more or less expected there to be some problems with the technique as she knew for a fact that she was cultivating it exactly as described, but such an extreme reaction from Elizabeth blew away any of the anger that might have come from having her method be desecrated so maliciously. She honestly only wanted to know what made Elizabeth think so poorly of her technique, as it had gotten her so far along the martial path with no major problems. Aside from some of the cold pains she got, there was nothing she could think of that would make her technique THAT bad, and given that most cultivation techniques — that she knows of — came with one side effect or another, she previously thought she was let off with a much better deal than other pract.i.tioners if the height of the pain she had to sustain were just some occasional cold pains.

"What makes this technique so bad? Where do I even begin?! If I listed every flaw I found with regards to the method"s pathway design and energy flow management, we"d be here for hours! To summarize, there are about 200 points of critical failure when it comes to pathway design and if you want proof, I could stimulate all those points to show you as those are where your acupoints and meridians have frozen over. Then, there are pa.s.sages in the mantra where the philosophical principles directly contradict with where certain points of energy are to turn. And lastly and probably worst of all, literally all the release points of the energy cycling route are placed either in the Dantian or near it! It"s no wonder why you"re Dantian is crumbling and on the brink of implosion!"