The Sun-Moon Divine Pellet (2)
"Jin-soo, could you wash me off?"
"Sure."
Shin Sua's face was burning red as she asked, and Jin-soo answered at once, calling up a water-attribute spell to conjure clean water.
A cool torrent roared over her, scouring away the murky sweat and the flakes of shed skin. The price was that she was left looking like a drowned rat. Jin-soo followed with the ease of long practice, weaving fire- and wind-attribute magic to boil the water off, and in a heartbeat her face and clothes were soft, dry, and perfectly neat.
"Thanks."
Jin-soo smiled at that. The spells he had used were not for battle but for ordinary living, the sort that became indispensable when you camped for days in a hunting ground or pushed through floors of the Tower where no city stood.
"Those mage skills are truly wondrous. To think one might wash oneself clean without even removing one's clothes."
"They help quite a bit when you're camping rough. Still, nothing really matches an actual bath."
Even so, it was far more refreshing than wiping down with a damp cloth.
"Ah. I see."
Jin-soo's words sent old memories unspooling through Cheon Museong's mind like a panorama. In those days he had been so desperate merely to eat and sleep that washing came last, and so he had wandered with hair and beard caked into mats, skin grimy, and clothes he never had the chance to launder. Back then, the only way was to stumble on a valley or a lake by luck, and only then could I wash and do my laundry. With Jin-soo beside him, there was no need to endure that hardship.
"Shall we head out?"
Shin Sua was clean now, and there was no reason to linger in a hidden dungeon they had already cleared.
"Yes. Let us do so. I should be glad if we might meet with another such heaven-sent opportunity in the days to come."
Cheon Museong spoke with expectation bright on his face.
He's already at the point of hoping for even finer elixirs. His aversion to spiritual medicines seemed to have vanished completely. The Sun-Moon Divine Pellet must have agreed with him. Until now, Cheon Museong had stayed unmoved even when he swallowed elixirs that raised his stats. The Sun-Moon Divine Pellet was different.
Well, that stands to reason. It heightened the efficiency of his mana circuits and of his body itself, so that the same stats yielded greater power. What decides it, of course, is the martial art. A body remade by the Sun-Moon Divine Pellet would perform the very same techniques with better efficiency than before, and for a man as mad for the martial path as Cheon Museong, coveting the pellet was inevitable.
An elixir worth far more than the Demon Spirit Divine Pill. The supply, then, was certain to be small—so small that the chance of one ever appearing at the auction house was vanishingly slim. Still, it's worth looking. Jin-soo added the Sun-Moon Divine Pellet to the list of items he searched for at the auction house every day.
His party left the hidden dungeon and took up the hunt once more.
After clearing the hidden dungeon, Jin-soo pressed on with his achievement work. The days repeated themselves, yet he never found them dull. His blessings grew slowly but without pause, and Cheon Museong's progress stood out above the rest.
The old martial artist labored without rest to invent a new art that would harmonize his class skills with his techniques, and under Jin-soo's instruction he gradually refined the arts he already possessed, the Formless Sword Art and the Formless Heart Method.
This time, it really might be possible. Cheon Museong had been strong before the regression, but the man he was becoming now would be stronger still. And the same goes for Sua.
Even before the regression, Shin Sua, the Holy Saintess, had stood at the very peak of healers. Her flaw had been how late she advanced into the class. Climbing that high in spite of it was remarkable enough. Still, he could not deny it was better to have no such flaw at all. She had met Jin-soo on the Tower's fiftieth floor and walked with him, stepping onto the healer's path far sooner than in her previous life.
Because of that, she was racing toward the summit of the healer's art at a pace that hardly bore comparison with before. Having taken the Demon Spirit Divine Pill and then the Sun-Moon Divine Pellet, her skill improved by leaps and bounds.
A shame the auction house never has a Sun-Moon Divine Pellet. From the day he first consumed one, Jin-soo searched the listings whenever he opened the auction house, and not once had a Sun-Moon Divine Pellet appeared among them. Then again, if one did show up and the price was outrageous, that would be its own problem.
He earned points steadily by selling what the hunt brought in, and through Item Synthesis besides. Even so, he was desperately short of what he needed to buy the items he absolutely had to have. Keep building the points, and someday I'll be able to buy them.
The gear he was already using was absurdly excessive for the Tower's 200th Floor. Had he not hunted a bone dragon and turned the vile temperament of Garamikan, the Death Lord, to his own ends, he would have been hard-pressed even to lay eyes on such things, let alone own them.
Time to move on to the next city soon. Only two achievements remained to be earned by hunting the monsters between the Starting City and the second city, and he had already cleared every hidden dungeon and open dungeon nearby. Once I've taken everything there is to take, there's no point in choosing to camp out.
That was the night he resolved to claim those two achievements and leave. A small change came over Cheon Museong after he finished sparring with the Shadow Summons.
"A new martial art has been born—one that combines my class skills with my techniques."
All this while, Cheon Museong had sparred with the Shadow Summons every single day without fail. There had been gains, large and small, but creating an entirely new art was no easy thing. Jin-soo knew full well how hard it was, and so he had expected it to take a very long time. I even thought he might fail. He had not. Cheon Museong had created a new art far sooner than Jin-soo had anticipated.
"Has the System recognized it?"
"Yes. A martial art by the name of the Guardian Shield-Sword has been registered with the System."
Cheon Museong answered with a calm face. For a man who had achieved his goal of creating a new art, he showed little joy. So the art the System registered fell short of what he hoped for.
Martial arts that players from the Museong Dimension had already mastered were automatically recognized by the System as skills, and a newly created art was treated the same. Recognition, however, did not mean every art stood at a high grade. Even the lowest of arts, the Three Calamities Sword Art or the Six Harmonies Sword Art, can be acknowledged as skills. Once the System recognized an art and generated a skill, that skill gained levels, and the advantage was enormous. Raise the Three Calamities Sword Art high enough through steady practice, and you might even defeat a player who had learned the Plum Blossom Thirty-Six Sword or the Taiji Sword Art. At equal skill levels, though, it would be absolutely impossible. Assuming equal stats, only an overwhelming gap in skill level could make such a thing possible.
The level of a skill matters, but so does its grade. To take an extreme case, a level-1 supreme-grade attack skill obtained on the Tower's two-thousandth floor could deal more damage than a level-100 lowest-grade attack skill from Floor 1. And the higher those levels climb, the wider the gap grows. A higher-grade skill demanded more experience to level, yet its power rose by a greater margin in return.
The old man isn't the sort to rejoice just because some art he wanted happened to take shape. He almost certainly hungered to create a sword art that could stand beside the Formless Sword Art he was cultivating now. Maybe he wanted to graft tank skills onto the Formless Sword Art and grow them together. What emerged instead was only a second-rate or third-rate art, so disappointment was natural. Even so, that disappointment came of Cheon Museong wanting too much. No one fills their belly with the first spoonful.
Simply creating an art the System recognized was already a tremendous achievement. Among players from Museong, those who forged a martial art of their own and won the System's acknowledgment were exceedingly rare. Before the regression, even the old man never created a new art and had it recognized.
In that previous life, Cheon Museong had contributed enormously to turning the Formless Sword Art and the Formless Heart Method into new skills, the Martial Soul Sword Art and the Martial Soul Heart Method. The one who registered them with the System, however, had been Jin-soo, not Cheon Museong. Granted, in understanding and in completion, the old man before the regression stood far above the man he is now.
To that earlier Cheon Museong, creating a new art had meant nothing. He had known that success would only produce something as crude as what the present Cheon Museong had just made, and he had judged that such an art would do him no good at all. But the old man of today is in a different place.
A low-grade art had been born? Then he had only to shore it up and grow it into something better. As his class level rose, more class skills would appear. He could just as well spend points on skill books a tank could use, and learn those.
"You've succeeded. Aren't you pleased?"
"This is a wretched art. I would be ashamed to call it a success."
"So you're disappointed?"
The Cheon Museong Jin-soo knew would not break over something like this.
At that answer, a bright smile bloomed on Jin-soo's face.
"You're remarkable."
"Remarkable? I am only doing what ought to be done."
The Cheon Museong of before the regression had never answered like that. He had only said he did not wish to waste time on something meaningless. This is good. Jin-soo was glad—genuinely happy. I'm fortunate I met him early.
Because of that, he could change Cheon Museong's thinking, and the life that lay ahead of him. All over again, Jin-soo felt a deep gratitude toward the Yellow God and the Red God, who had gifted him a second life.
Having finished the achievement work he had set out to do, Jin-soo's party moved on to the second city.
"For a while we'll use this city as our base and hunt from here, right?"
Jin-soo nodded at Shin Sua's question.
"Right. We won't stay all that long."
The hunting grounds near the second city had little to offer. The monster species there were not much different from those around the Starting City, so there were almost no additional achievements to be gained. I'll sweep anywhere a hidden dungeon might be nearby, then leave. Three or four days would be enough—five or six at the very longest.
The party entered the city, took lodgings, and for the first time in a long while bathed in hot water in a proper bathroom and sat down to a proper meal.
First, the auction house. Jin-soo opened it and searched for the items he needed. Nothing. Unfortunately, not a single thing he wanted was there, the Sun-Moon Divine Pellet included.
At least the items are selling well. That's a relief. What he had obtained through hunting, along with the pieces made by Item Synthesis, sold quite well. The increase in listing slots makes a real difference. At the start he had possessed a mere ten. Now that number had grown to one hundred and ninety. Even so, it still feels like too few.
For an ordinary player, simply holding a hundred and ninety items worth listing at the auction house was nearly impossible. Being a player did not mean you always walked away with loot. But my circumstances are different. The volume he regularly collected from his summons alone was staggering, and on top of that he was selling synthesized items. A hundred and ninety listing slots were, of course, nowhere near enough.
At least Sua and the old man are helping. That's a mercy. Shin Sua had been handling Jin-soo's sales for some time, and after watching her do it while they camped, Cheon Museong had offered to help as well. Between them, they could put out the worst of the fire. The problem is that the items keep piling up.
For now, his inventory and treasure pouches could cover it. If things continued this way, though, trouble was inevitable later on. Sell them at a city shop and it's a pittance... Should I dump them on Lucy? If it was Lucy, that easy mark, he was certain she would buy the stock he could hardly offload, and at a decent price besides.