Novel Full 76 Life of Normalcy
It had been a month since I had left the dungeon and after arduous days of constant training and little rest, I had finally hit a bottleneck.
“So you’ve finally given up and chose to confine on the wisdom of your master? Ho Ho Ho! Then I shall teach you, my little disciple! I shall teach you the ways of the white snake tribe!” Blanca let out an annoying and prideful laugh as she stood in front of me, her arms subtly crossed below her boasting and prideful puffed-up chest.
‘I can almost smell the pride on her words.’ I thought white grimacing for a few moments as I sat on the ground in a seiza position while my hands lay on my thighs.
One could constantly see my brows twitching in annoyance as Blanca shouted more and more obscene things, but from what I could tell, she was enjoying every second of my torture.
“To think you’d finally come to be after reaching your breaking point!” She boasted once again, her hands now on her hips while her chin pointed towards the ceiling of the cave as she let out another hearty laugh.
“I didn’t reach my breaking po-“-.
“Silence junior! Do not speak unless, I, your master, permit you to!” She shouted into my face, causing droplets of saliva to taint my face that shone with the purity of gold itself!
However, instead of complaining I only furrowed my brows and cleaned my face using the cloth of my fur coat that had an automatic cleaning system that I had only identified after using my blood eyes. Not knowing that it was at first, I tried to use the help of the Book of Runes but even then, I was forced to ask Blanca to tell me the rune’s function, an action I had come to regret in the days to come.
For the past month, I had not only been refining my martial arts, but I had also begun my journey of attempting to level up my skills ranging from blood eyes and pinpoint to life drain. I had also exposed my earth affinity to Blanca after seeing that I would need to also level those abilities up, something I would also come to regret after seeing her exaggerated cries of-
“How could you not tell me about something so important!” and-
“I thought we trusted one another with each other’s lives, but to think you couldn’t trust me with something as simple as letting me know your affinity!”
When she finally had had enough of crying for what felt like hours, she clung to me with enough strength that I was unable to move her without having to once again endure her cries. So for the following few days, I was forced to deal with an adult cry baby whenever I attempted to rest after training.
Speaking of training, I had also discovered something that helped me tremendously in the past two weeks, allowing my improvement to skyrocket in the past few days.
After constantly using my muscles, I would need to rest and rebuild them, but with the use of my life drain ability, there was no longer a need for that. After all, a being with 15 hp could rejuvenate me to my peak, allowing me to carry on training without a hitch. The only problem was that while recuperating, I would not have the ability to hunt for my prey. Nevertheless, I always had Blanca do that job for me, something that she agreed to without a moment of hesitation and made me thoroughly confused in the process.
While destroying and recreating my muscles didn’t give me any points in my strength, agility, and vitality stats like it usually would have done, I could feel something different happening instead.
I was no longer destroying my muscles to make them stronger, but instead, I was destroying them to recreate them into something more efficient.
Every time this cycle continued, I felt like my muscles were becoming more robust, needing less energy to function, less oxygen, and overall less nutrition to sustain.
I could feel them slowly but surely becoming the perfect killing weapons, allowing me to perform my earlier attacks much more easily than before, and since the first steps of the art of wind were simply used to create a solid foundation to creating a body used to moving with agility and the use of large amounts of momentum, this cycle of torture only showed to have further aided that path.
However, without leveling up, I would forever be stuck at 40 points of strength, vitality, and agility, making my determination to become stronger only increase since I truly needed to create a body that was more suitable for fighting in dungeons.
Anyway, now that I had hit my bottleneck, I was forced to ask for Blanca’s assistance, something she pounced at like a hungry lion that had been waiting weeks for its prey to finally come to it.
“Call me master and I’ll think about teaching you!” She announced smugly, but instead of getting the pleading expression that she expected from me, she instead received a cold glare as I finally began to get up to walk away and never ask her again.
“Okay okay! You don’t have to call me master. Just don’t complain about any of my teaching strategies.” She harrumphed before walking away and sitting on a stool that she had carved out of a boulder she found.
“What I really should be complaining about is the fact that you haven’t made my armor or weapon yet. Hell, even the potions you promised me haven’t been made.” I complained with annoyance while pointing at the pile of materials at the other end of the room.
“I didn’t find any time to do it.” She smiled innocently.
“Yeah, but that’s ’cause you’ve done nothing but eat for the last month. Look at you! You are gaining weight at this point!” I retorted.
When she heard my retort, she went beet red but made sure to throw some final words in “Y-Y-You! You bastard! I’m not gaining weight! This amount of food is nothing to someone like me!”
“Sure sure.” I let out a mocking pitying smile and looked away, making her anger boil even more than before
“Why you!” She immediately pounced on me like an aggravated cat before attacking me with the intent of getting revenge.
For the next few hours, one could hear the shrill screams of a man leaving the cave and echoing through the vast forest, and while the beasts around were curious about what was happening, not a single one of them dared to move closer and identify the source of the sounds.
After a series of hours of several beasts shuddering and running as far away as possible from the cave, the screams finally stopped and I once again found myself sitting on the ground in the seiza position, yet unlike the last time this happened, several scratch marks could be seen all over my skin while even a large bite mark shone with redness at the back of my neck.
Sighing, Blanca sat down once again and finally began to speak once again, her voice entering my ears like a soft melody as if nothing had happened previous to this.
“From what I can see, you cannot improve your strength anymore, or at least not to the scale of improvement you had before you entered the dungeon. In reality, you should be taking this time to refine your skills and abilities, but since I don’t really specialize in fighting, I can only help you with something else…” Hearing her words, I looked up with curiosity and waited for what she was going to say next
“You wanted to learn about runes right? Then I shall teach you as much as I can before we have to part ways. How about it? Are you up to the challenge or will you scurry back to your life of normalcy?”