One Last System

In this world, I was free. I had no ceiling pressuring me down from above.

This was the reason why I could do so much and work so hard.

Because in this world, my efforts would have tangible results. And one of them I could arrange right away.

I moved calmly out of my room roughly ten minutes after the encounter with Lucius.

I didn\'t bother thinking whether he heard me moving out or not. And to say it frankly, I couldn\'t care less.

In the end, he was only my Overseer.

As long as I provided the minimum quota required by the contract, he couldn\'t do anything.

In other words, right now, his advices were as important as the barking of the dog.

Sometimes useful, but mostly just an annoyance.

With the torch in my head, I moved out. My training ground was relatively close, just at the edge of the clearing.

\'There is still some light,\' I thought and kneeled down near the formation.

Bit by bit, I confirmed my guesses. The stones were all over the place.

\'It looks as if someone almost intentionally botched the work,\' I thought, judging the disaster.

The runes didn\'t make any sense. The sentences were canceling each other out, drastically bleeding mana away as a result.

\'It\'s either intentional,\' I thought, before releasing a deep sigh, \'or just spoiled goods of a mass production,\' I thought, rolling my eyes.

It appeared that this consumer\'s curse was all and well in this world too.

\'This is going to be a pain,\' I thought, thankful to my past safe for bringing the torch.

\'By the time the sun goes fully down, I will be still grasping at straws to fix it,\' I thought, getting to work.

My assumptions quickly proved true when the light of the torch remained as the only source of illumination for my work.

And it was tedious.

My initial attempts at meddling with the stone\'s order ended up like yet another disaster.

For every fix I would introduce, the complexity and thus wastefulness of the formation would spike.

It wasn\'t my fault per se, but an effect of an already botched product.

\'No, this can\'t be the way,\' I thought before calling the entire array back to its bag.

This was ultimately a wasteful move.

Outside of its passive effects of gathering the mana from the surroundings, it also kept the mana within the area.

In other words, with every second of his training, I was making this training ground of mine more effective.

And I just threw it away.

A distant voice of my perfectionist nature called out when I sat down and plotted the arrangement of the entire formation all on my own.

I only had the ideas that I stole from the books. Even though they were just the building blocks, after tinkering around and testing with a small portion of the stones, I found a proper way.

I started laying the formation out.

Instead of being a long, continuous sentence, it turned into an orderly row of short, sharp orders.

In essence, I constructed the entire formation from a set of simple orders. Before the change, it was just a single, convoluted, and extremely hard-to-solve problem. Now, it turned into an array.

An array that I used in my previous programming job a lot.

\'This is going to be fun,\' I thought as I fixed the last stone in the position.

The excitement of completing a project. The anticipation of whether it would work as desired or not. The mental hunt for the potential bugs and problems...

I was extremely familiar with those feelings. They were the source of my endorphins that pulled me through my depression-filled life.

And right now, standing above the finished formation, I finally connected all the dots.

Air flushed past my face. It swirled around the formation as if the magical effects of it were so strong they could affect the physical nature of the world.

\'Woah,\' I thought, baffled by sight.

Yes, not by the feeling, not by the premonition... but by sight.

For the first time in this life, I saw the training grounds that looked the part. It was filled with dense mana, and it offered far greater benefits than anything I previously worked with.

\'It\'s almost like infusing two to five mana stones per minute,\' I thought the second I stepped inside.

The feeling was insane.

Instead of just a single patch of my skin, my entire body experienced an insane influx of mana.

This was extremely different from how I would usually cultivate with the materials. Rather than infusing them into myself at a single point, my entire system was flooded by the rushing energy at once.

\'This is amazing,\' I thought. In an instant, my head filled with ideas.

But for now, I chased them all away.

\'This isn\'t the time to get excited yet,\' I thought, calming myself down and standing in the position.

\'This is the time to diligently train,\' I thought.

Ever since my encounter with the beast\'s trail in the forest, I felt uneasy. It wasn\'t a feeling at the forefront of my mind but something that lurked and festered in the shadow.

I could take it as an obstacle, a problem I had to overcome.

Instead, I started executing my punching routine, boxing with an imaginary shadow.

\'If I want to be safe, I need to get stronger,\' I thought, throwing my fists forward.

The reason why I was worried was that the beast from the forest was stronger than me.

Honestly speaking, I could tell I was stronger than many with the same level of cultivation. This was the perk of the system that I kind of anticipated.

But the power difference between that beast and me made all my tricks and traps worthless. The gap was just too damn massive.

That\'s why I focused all my efforts right now on obtaining the means to cultivate more efficiently. And just like my formation right now showed...

"A bit of preparation before can help with your task a lot later," I muttered, voicing one of the main things that my IT teachers taught me about.

It was finally the time for me to honestly outgrow those who stood against me!