paradigmfriday

Here are the chapters for the week! Thank you to everyone who's been reading and thank you to all my supporters! All of y'all are the absolute tops!

Two figures dropped from the sky hurtling downwards, falling under gravity's power, at first, and then casually using movement techniques and magic to slow their descent just as they were about to hit the ground.

One of the figures was a tall man. Broad chested, Broad-shouldered. Dark skin. Shaggy, slightly overlong, dark hair. Eyes that went beyond the realm of merely being dark and were filled with the very absence, and excess, of everything. A somber, sagacious, face with a subdued and understated kind of handsomeness.

The man was dressed in dark brown pants, and a simple white, button-down, shirt. His boots and long-coat were made of beast’s hide. The man didn’t make an impression. On the contrary, he seemed to make an anti-impression. You’d know he’d been there, and accept that some kind of interaction had happened, but it was almost like one’s mind would turn away from the finer details. That doesn't mean you forgot him. It just meant that one got the sense that whatever happened was some sort of secret that you’d decided to keep even from yourself. Repressing the recollection.

The other figure was a woman. Tall and slender, and fit, with an almost decadent curvaceousness. She had an oval face, with a sharp chin, full lips, and a long upturned nose. She had pale skin, the color of coffee drowned in milk, and she had snow-white hair. She was a striking woman with the haughty, anarchic, arrogance of some kind of apocalyptic, barbarian, queen. She dressed in black. Wearing a sort of, sleeveless, form-fitting, jumpsuit. An elegant jumpsuit that was paired with a black, fur-trimmed, beast-hide, long-coat that was closer to being a robe.

“Okay, we’re here now...What do we do?” said the woman. Looking a bit uncertain breaking the illusion of absolute confidence and unflappability.

“Er...I’m not sure. I uh...I guess we could look for a place to stay for the time being, then we’ll figure the rest out afterward,” said the man. His hesitant speech patterns, destroying any impression of him having seen it all and known it all.

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So...it’s been 6 to 7 years since Jack and I left the 17th Pearl. I was 22 now. Jack was 23. After we parted ways with our friends as they left the Bellgrave Jungle behind, we spent the rest of that time until now, going up, down, and all over that jungle, hunting for powerful foes, and potent materials. At more than 30,000 miles in length from end to end, and with hundreds of millions square miles of densely forested area, I’d never dare say we saw the totality of the Bellgrave Jungle. However, thanks to the [Tale of the Fool] and the [Tale of the Empty Archivist’s Heir], I can at least say that we definitely saw most of what the jungle had to offer.

We killed giants, we killed true-dragons(albeit, just the smallest and weakest ones), we killed hundreds of millions of beasts and tens of thousands of deranged spirits. We found countless treasures and natural resources. Jack and I did our best to play the part of locusts stripping any area we went too clean of anything of value. If the dirt, water, or air was particularly rich in spiritual energy, or elemental energy, we wouldn’t even leave “that” behind. Now after 6 to 7 years of hunting for treasures, and powerful foes, we’d finally decided that we’d done enough damage to the Bellgrave, and elected to return to the civilized world.

There were two main reasons we decided to return to civilization when we did. The first reason was that we felt strong enough by this point. In terms of stats, my strength, constitution, agility, dexterity, perception, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, and luck had all reached an exceedingly high point of extreme height and rate of growth. Like I’ve said before, the idle-Clicker system makes mostly go by feel, but based on the self-awareness regarding my own state that has been granted to me by the [Tale of the Soldier], the [Tale of the Hunter], and the [Tale of the Cultivator], I can safely safe I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 to 100 million times the human average for all my stats. In terms of the shattered world's cultivation rankings, that puts me at either Peak-stage Primordial rank, or Beginner-Stage True-Soul Rank. Jack’s cultivation in magic and the martial path has put her in the same neighborhood.

For the sake of not overestimating ourselves, I’m going to say we’re Peak-Stage Primordials. However, in either case, whether we’re Primordial-Ranked or True-Soul ranked, that was still plenty powerful enough for us to stop being so shy about showing our faces in society. The difference between the spiritual energy concentration within the three realms meant that there were differences in prospects for the three realms, which meant that as you went from the low-realm, to the middle-realm, and the high-realm, there was a noticeable power creep. Like something out of current day cultivation stories, or old-world shonen comics. However, even accounting for that power-creep, the Primordial and True-Soul ranks were still a pretty big deal.

To put things in perspective, most super-secret, top of the food-chain, ancestors, and old monsters, in the low-realm were Verdant-ranked. That changed to the Epic-Rank for the middle-realm. Then for the high-realm, the [Tale of the Fool] told me that there were probably a few Sages and Saints hiding in the background. The three ranks of cultivation above the Saint-rank, the Nascent-Immortal, Immortal, and Eternal Rank, were basically myths. Either that, or everyone who’d reached that level of strength had already either died, or long ago fucked off to worlds that could support and aid the further growth of their abilities.

In more practical terms, we weren’t at the top of the food chain for our Shattered World, but we’d reached a high enough point where we didn’t need to be overly afraid of the world around us. The portion of the population that was strong enough to threaten us was small enough that at this point, the cost-benefit of staying out in the wilderness versus interacting with the world at large, had almost completely flipped itself around. While we “could” have just found some other wilderness area to farm for foes and resources, there was stuff that we’d be missing out on, by continuing to avoid people, and the risk of harm was now so low that it no longer made sense to hide as we’d been doing.

Also, there was our second reason for coming out of seclusion. We were bored. There were only so many days in a row one could hunt, fight, and train, until it all started to blur together. We’d initially intended to leave the Jungle after at least ten years had passed, but we were growing simultaneously slower and faster than we’d intended.

Reaching the Primordial/True-Soul ranks was something we hadn’t believed we’d reach this early in the game. Then we’d both immediately experienced an immediate slow down upon reaching our current level of strength that signified that we’d likely have to spend multiple decades trying to reach the next rank. We could have continued sticking things out if the rate of growth stayed steady, even if it had been a much slower rate of growth.

Alas, we’d reached a plateau and that drastic slowing down of our growth, made it feel almost like we were wasting our time out there. Especially, when there wasn’t that much to be afraid of, anymore. So here we were, trying to reintegrate with the world of men, with no real clue of what entails, because we’d just been kids when we started this whole journey, and even with the help of my Idle-Clicker System, figuring out how to deal with the world at large was probably going to need to take some doing.