Chapter 565: Keep Your Head Down and Draw Trait Tags, But You Can’t Draw Any Good Ones!

Time passed.

In the simulation, Chen Yi had already spent twenty years on Earth.

Over those twenty years, he had reached Minor Achievement in the Martial Scripture.

Just as he had estimated, comprehending it himself was faster than relying on the Proficiency trait tag.

That was because the number of practice sessions required to advance from Minor Achievement to Great Achievement could no longer be displayed on the panel. There were simply too many zeroes.

That wasn’t realistic.

Or rather, it was the system’s way of telling Chen Yi outright: the Martial Scripture had to be comprehended. Don’t try to take shortcuts.

Fortunately, the Martial Scripture’s Great Dao was simple and direct. There was nothing obscure about it, only profound depth. It was like a classic that revealed something new each time he read it.

Now, if the conditions around him allowed it, Chen Yi would cultivate even faster than before.

Making cultivation faster was only one of the Martial Scripture’s many charms.

Chen Yi could feel all his abilities melding together after cultivating the Martial Scripture.

Spells, killing moves, Divine Abilities, Divine Arts, even alchemy, artifact forging, formations, and certain trait tags seemed to be different expressions of the same thing within the framework of the Martial Scripture.

The Martial Scripture was unifying all the powers of the immortal path, while beneath its simple surface lay a vast sea of information about that path.

That was why it revealed something new each time. There was still so much left for him to comprehend.

The more he learned from the Martial Scripture, the higher its Proficiency rank naturally became.

Over these twenty years, Chen Yi had also noticed something strange.

He had drawn twenty trait tags in twenty years, and the proportion of white trait tags among them was clearly too high. It didn’t match the current ten-percent probability of drawing a white trait tag.

This wasn’t because the sample size was too small.

Looking back on his past experiences, Chen Yi realized he had seen similar patterns before.

Whenever the things he experienced were simple and monotonous, his chances of drawing low-quality trait tags during that period increased. Even if he drew a high-quality one, its effect was usually abstract and difficult to put to use.

For example, during the hundred years he spent cultivating with the Ji family in his sixth simulation, he had gone out adventuring with Ji Wuqing from time to time, but in reality, he had mostly just been sightseeing.

When he went through hardship and endured suffering, his chances of drawing high-quality trait tags went up.

Moreover, the higher his theoretical lifespan became, the more pronounced this phenomenon grew.

So he worked out a pattern.

If he wanted to rely on simulations to draw trait tags, then even if he could live for ten thousand years, he couldn’t just stay in one place and draw tags without doing anything else.

Even if he managed to draw ten thousand of them that way, most would probably be garbage.

【Year 146, age 172.】

【Drawing a trait tag...】

【Draw successful!】

【“Super Mario” (White, Common): You’re very good at navigating sewers.】

【Would you like to adjust the trait tag?】

【Yes/No】

【You chose No.】

【“Just as I thought...”】

【Looking at yet another white trait tag, you fell into thought.】

【“But I’m stuck on Earth right now, and I’m invincible here. It’s not like I’m choosing to lay low... Should I make trouble for myself? Maybe suppress my cultivation and go after rich and powerful people, then show off and slap them in the face?”】

【Alternatively, you considered whether you should risk venturing into space, pilot a Star Ship in one direction, and keep flying in the hope of finding a Channel.】

【“Forget it. The universe is too vast. Even the tiniest deviation in direction could leave me thousands of miles off course. It’d be even worse than looking for a needle in the ocean. Going into space like that would be suicide. Even drawing nothing but white trait tags is better than drawing none at all, and it’s not as if every tag is white.”】

【At the moment, you weren’t in the Origin Cave.】

【You couldn’t stand being cooped up in a cave every day.】

【Right now, you were at a nightclub in Jinghai City.】

【What were you there for?】

【To make friends, of course. What else?】

【The owner of the place was on good terms with you because you had once saved his life in passing.】

【He had connections in the government and knew plenty of inside information. He had guessed that you might be a cultivator, so he went out of his way to curry favor with you.】

【That worked out nicely. It saved you from having to rob the rich to fund your own fun whenever you wanted to go out in the city.】

【That day, you were at the nightclub discussing with a female university student from a prestigious school how to use a super-powered electromagnetic field to restore the energy lost as electromagnetic waves traveled across the scale of the universe, enabling their transmission over extremely long distances.】

【Jin Ding Zhenren suddenly barged in.】

【Fortunately, the two of you really had been discussing electromagnetic waves.】

【“Zhenren, what’s wrong?”】

【“This is terrible! The, the, the United States has a monster!”】

【“What? A monster?”】

【You immediately increased the divine power output of the Traffic Light and boosted the power of your Divine Sense, extending it across the ocean to the United States.】

【“Holy crap! There really is a monster!”】

【In a major city in the western United States,】

【a monster dozens of meters tall was engaged in combat with tanks, fighter jets, combat robots, and special forces.】

【It took only a moment for you to lose your composure. You stood up, brow furrowed.】

【“Wait, that looks like... Formless!”】

【From the information fed back by your Divine Sense, you discovered that whenever the monster was attacked, its injuries healed rapidly, and body parts resembling the source of the attack grew from the areas that had been hit.】

【After being blasted by a cannon, it grew a cannon barrel on its body.】

【After being struck by a combat robot, it grew blades.】

【After being swept by a fighter jet’s laser, its eyes began firing lasers too, and it even grew mechanical wings!】

【No one knew how long it had been fighting the United States military. Its body had already mutated beyond recognition, becoming a half-flesh, half-machine chimera.】

【There was no clear sign of a head, limbs, or torso. It was nothing but a monstrous jumble of mismatched parts!】

【What else could it be but Formless?】

【At the same time, you recalled the Posthumous Affairs from your sixth simulation. It had mentioned that a Formless covered in modern weapons had appeared on the Vermilion Violet Star.】

【Now, you seemed to know where that Formless had come from.】

【“Wait...”】

【If this Formless would appear on the Vermilion Violet Star years from now, didn’t that mean you had a way to return from Earth to the core region of the Celestial River local galaxy?】

【All you had to do was follow the same route Formless took to get back, right?】

【But on closer thought, something didn’t add up.】

【You knew Formless well.】

【It had no real self-awareness.】

【Even when it seemed to show self-awareness, it was only reacting and imitating.】

【It shouldn’t be capable of thinking, “There’s nothing left to do on Earth. I’ll go explore somewhere else.”】

【So there was only one conclusion.】

【“Someone sent Formless here. And years later, when it appeared on the Vermilion Violet Star, someone must have taken it there from Earth!”】

【You searched as far as your Divine Sense could reach, but didn’t find anyone suspicious.】

【Jin Ding Zhenren watched as you stood motionless, then cautiously asked,】

【“Senior, could you perhaps... step in once more? That monster may be in the United States right now, but I doubt they can handle it. Sooner or later, the whole world will suffer...”】