Chapter 163: Life 68, Age 33, Martial Grandmaster 7

Words : 1583 Updated : Oct 13th, 2025

When I appeared in the Trial, I looked across the cavern at my opponent, a large stone golem. As was common for the first five levels of this Trial, the construct didn’t move to attack me. Normally at this point, I would begin setting up a few quick Qi Gathering Formations to drain the area of energy and pass the stage without a fight, but this time, I had a different idea in mind. I had learned a lot about fighting recently, and it would be good to use these early levels to hone my skills. Since the golem wouldn’t take the initiative to attack, I spent several minutes setting up a few safety measures around the room in the event that I felt out of my depth once the fighting started. These included a few Shielding Formations to provide me places to hide and a few Qi Gathering Formations that I could activate if needed to partially drain the energy from the environment and slow the golem down. Once everything was set up, I studied the golem to figure out the best ways to attack it. As I did, a new idea popped into my head. I cautiously approached the golem and activated my formation analysis ability. Unknown Rank Unknown Formation Rank 3 Mobile Defense Node Base Material: Marble and Unknown — Base Material Quality: Unknown Energy Throughput: Unknown Energy Efficiency: Unknown Even with all the unknowns, this still told me a couple of things. First, being a ‘Defense Node’ meant that this golem was just a small piece of some larger grand formation. This formation might have originally been designed to create mechanical warriors for city defense applications. Of more interest to me was how the grand formation was constructed. Since my ability couldn’t identify it, the grand formation had to be above Rank 3. It was likely far, far above Rank 3. However, the golem was successfully identified as a Rank 3 node. This opened up some interesting possibilities for using low-Rank nodes within a high-Rank formation that I hadn’t considered before. I would have to study this more in the future. This analysis did not, however, provide me with any workable means of subverting the construct’s controls, so I moved on and prepared for my attack. Once everything was ready, I rushed forward and aimed to fight the stone construct using only my physical strength and unpowered martial abilities. Of course, simply punching a rock with nothing but a bare fist would just leave me with a broken hand, so I sheathed my arms in qi as I attacked, but I didn’t attack with any energy directly. The moment I began my offensive, the golem started moving. It wasn’t very fast, but if it hit me, I would be in a world of hurt. I did my best to dart in and attack potential weak points in the thing’s joints, but my hits did little to no damage. Eventually, my luck ran out and I got hit by a glancing blow. I was knocked back several meters, and the shielding formation that I had strapped around my neck broke apart. Taking out a new shielding formation from a small satchel and donning it, I considered what to do next. I had wanted to get in some basic martial combat practice, but these things were too dangerous, and I wasn’t yet skilled enough to compete with them. Deciding to play it safe and move on to more qi-centric practice, I began incorporating Lord Gong’s pushing and pulling into my attacks. Even though the golem was made from stone, the formations on its body prevented my qi from controlling it directly, so I had to work with the materials lying around the arena. I tried a few different tactics, including raising the earth beneath one of the golem’s feet to make it trip and trying to shove rock spears into its joints, but none of these ideas had much of an effect. In the end, I was forced to simply bash it to death with stone after stone. When the thing was finally defeated, I collapsed in exhaustion. Trying to fight like that had used up a large portion of my qi, and it would take time to recover. Lord Gong’s fighting style might have advantages in simplicity, but not relying on set techniques forced me to use far more energy than I otherwise would have. If there had been weak fleshy bits I could have attacked, things might have been different, but constantly using copious amounts of energy to bash one rock into another rock was far too exhausting. Still, my reason for coming here wasn’t to go deep into the Trial to gather essence. I was here to train, and since the rock golems were able to absorb so much punishment, they would serve as an excellent punching bag. With the power behind the golems’ attacks, I had to be careful, but once I knew what I was doing, I was able to avoid its strikes and the fight hadn’t been overly dangerous. For the second stage, I used a spear of wood fire to down one of the golems before it could activate. The moment I did, the other one came alive and started attacking me. This time, as I danced with the construct, I worked to incorporate flames from the Cold Mountain Fire into my attacks. The earth fire didn’t burn through the thing's body like the wood fire had, but the seed had the advantage of only requiring a minimal amount of my own qi to activate. By using hit-and-run tactics and quickly burning down enemies with the wood fire when I was overwhelmed, I was able to climb all the way to the twenty-first floor before I had to bow out. If I hadn’t spent so much time practicing and had spent a bit more time trying to quickly take out my opponents, I could have gone further, but that wasn’t important to me. I could come back here again and again to gather as much essence as I needed. Learning to fight was a better use of my time. As for the rewards from the trip, I received a substantial amount of essence, but I was uncertain how it compared to what I got in the Master-level Trials or how much more I would need to advance my affinities. In any case, I would just keep draining the place until I hit my limit. After leaving the Trial, I went directly to the Mission Hall and put in a request for a new combat trainer. Lord Gong’s training had been valuable, and I felt that it had dramatically improved certain aspects of my martial ability, but the biggest drawback of his combat style was the massive amounts of energy it took to use. “Let’s wait and see what we’re up against. If the plan looks viable after we reach the city, we can try it out.” I nodded. JiaQi and YuLong looked excited. Their blessings revolved around fighting, and this was the first time they would get to put them to a real test. Only LiTing looked pensive, but I wasn’t sure why. As we were preparing to head out, I ducked into a side room to put one extra safeguard in place just in case everything went horribly wrong. “System, how much to establish a new secondary reset point.” Cost 10,291,304,960 credits. My eyes went wide. “How? That... that can’t be right.” A significant number of temporal anomalies have been detected. Cost has been adjusted to compensate. “What ‘temporal anomalies?’ What does that mean?” Items not native to this timeline have been detected. My heart began to beat faster, and my breathing sped up. Was something going wrong? Was this something I did, or was someone else interfering with the loops somehow? “System, did those temporal anomalies come from me or another source?” Calculating... Cost 10,000 credits. “Purchase.” Purchase confirmed. 6,733,076,524 credits remaining. Temporal anomalies originated from host’s storage space. From my... “System, are you talking about the spirit stones I gave my classmates?” Calculating... Cost 1,000 credits. I ground my teeth before replying. “Purchase.” Purchase confirmed. 6,733,075,588 credits remaining. Temporal anomalies are 1,578 spirit stones, 41 gold bars, and miscellaneous papers. That calmed me a bit. The ‘anomalies’ were of my own making. They were items I had brought into this loop from other timelines. While that had implications for how I could use reset points moving forward, it wasn’t a crisis. I would just have to be more frugal with handing things out from my storage space in the future to prevent this from happening again. The most important thing was that it meant I wouldn’t be able to set up any more secondary reset points in this life, so dying would mean returning straight to when I first entered South Gate City. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of not relying on a secondary reset point again. It would make the time I had with my classmates more meaningful. I... I could try to be a real friend to them in the little time we had remaining. I walked out of the small side room and saw everyone waiting for me. I gave them a slight nod, and we headed out.

Chapter 163: Life 68, Age 33, Martial Grandmaster 7

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