Chapter 18: First Elemental Cultivation
The beast’s eyes were wide, brimming with mix of rage at its companions’ demise, but also with a deep, wary hesitation.
Uhtred didn’t move an inch. He knelt upright among the fallen, bloody carcasses of its brothers. With his clothes shredded, his back painted in deep crimson lines, and his skin caked in layers of dark gore and blood.
Seeing him kneeling there without a trace of fear in his eyes, he didn’t look like a human anymore, rather, he looked like an apex predator, one far more dangerous and unpredictable than any in these parts of the forest.
Uhtred’s and the beast’s eyes were locked across the distance in a silent contest of wills. Several seconds ticked by like that. Until finally, the tension broke.
The wolf-hyena’s ears dipped downward, its posture slumping in a clear, submissive concession of dominance. It let out a low, mournful whimper, then turned on its heel and vanished into the forest alone.
The moment the beast’s silhouette disappeared, the adrenaline that had been keeping Uhtred upright evaporated.
His shoulders sagged heavily, and his knees trembled, sending him crashing backwards onto the wet sand. He let out a long, ragged gasp as the full brunt of the battle on his body took hold.
Every single cut, every deep gash on his back, at his sides, and all over his body began to hurt and burn like hell. Even the strain he’d felt in his chest from his core during the fight began to throb with a more excruciating pain. His muscles cramped violently from overexertion, and his vision tilted dangerously.
But he didn’t let himself go unconscious.
Gritting his teeth hard, he dragged his bleeding body along the sand, moving from one wolf carcass to the next. He grabbed his Beast Core Extraction Artifact from where it had fallen during his tumbles, then with shaky hands, he pressed it against their chests.
The device immediately went to work, punching through the hides and drawing out the glowing essence cores within seconds.
As Uhtred held the harvested cores, he could feel his Level 8 vitality attribute and natural enhanced healing working hard, trying to mend the deep lacerations on his back, but the process was agonizingly slow and deeply painful.
At the current rate, it would take no less than a whole day or two before he would be fully healed, which was still very fast. However, Uhtred couldn’t wait that long. He wanted to speed up his recovery as much as he could. And the only way to do that was by pushing his level as high as possible. He needed to hit Level 10... and he intended to do it here and now.
Despite how vulnerable he was, Uhtred had no intention of slinking away into somewhere in the forest like a wounded animal to hide. His mindset had thoroughly changed and adapted to the primal reality of this world, especially after this battle.
Any predator lurking in the surrounding shadows that thought about attacking him would look at the three bear-sized carcasses surrounding him and think twice.
He knew the rules of the wild now, and he was completely owning it. This clearing was his territory by right of slaughter.
Grimacing as he forced himself to sit cross-legged in the center of the blood-stained sand, Uhtred closed his eyes, held the first beast core in his palm, and began to cultivate his way to Level 10 immediately.
The moment his core began to siphon the cosmic essence from the wolf core, Uhtred immediately noticed a glaring difference, not just in the raw quality of the essence flowing from the core, but also in its fundamental nature.
While the cosmic essence he had cultivated from the monitor lizards had been a broad, vague kind of energy, entirely focused on physical agility and toughness without leaning toward any particular element, the essence bound inside these wolf cores was completely different.
The more his greedy core drank from the sphere in his palm, the more a strange, sharp sensation began to bleed into his perception.
He could feel metal.
These cores were fully metal-attuned. The reason why the beasts had been classified by the System as Metal-Jawed Epicyon Wolves immediately became apparent. Their cores could only absorb the metallic aspects of cosmic essence, pulling those specific properties from the environment to fortify their skeletal structures and particularly reinforce their terrifying jaws.
As Uhtred devoured the essence in the cores, his own perception of the metal in his immediate surroundings began to broaden exponentially. It was a bizarre, intoxicating shift in reality.
He could suddenly feel the microscopic metallic flakes buried deep within the river sand beneath him. He could sense the tiny flecks drifting through the air around him.
To his enhanced senses, they felt like tiny motes of light, prickling against his awareness in a way he had never experienced before.
Acting on pure instinct, Uhtred honed his focus on those tiny motes, attempting to influence or tug on them in some manner. But before he could exert even a fraction of his intent, his connection cut off abruptly.
Uhtred opened his eyes quickly in surprise. Looking down at his palm, he found that the beast core had already been devoured entirely, reduced to a small pile of grey ash.
"So fast," he muttered under his breath, staring at his empty hand.
The sheer speed of the consumption was baffling. This was even faster than when he cultivated with the monitor lizard cores, and those had been much lower-leveled beasts. Logically, a higher-level beast’s core packed with denser essence should have taken longer to break down and cultivate.
How had his core devoured it in what felt like a matter of seconds?
But then Uhtred paused, taking note of something. The agonizing pain emanating from the cuts across his back and sides had cooled slightly.
The difference was very negligible, but the fact that he could perceive a definitive reduction in pain meant his body had already undergone a noticeable phase of reconstruction.
"Ohh..." Uhtred hummed in sudden realization. It wasn’t that his core devoured the essence so fast, but rather, he was so immersed and his attention was so focused on the metal flecks that he hadn’t noticed the passage of time at all.
Is this what true cultivation is supposed to feel like?
Uhtred’s curiosity was piqued by the thought, and he immediately picked up the second Epicyon Wolf core. This time, he was determined to keep a tight grasp on his awareness.
Closing his eyes, he deliberately suppressed his fascination with the metallic elements in the air and began to cycle his cosmic essence strictly in accordance with the low-grade cultivation manual the System had provided.
At first, the process was entirely standard. By ignoring the metallic flecks and forcing the energy to flow through the rigid, basic pathways outlined in the manual, he was able to accurately measure the rate of consumption.
The essence from the beast core surged into his arm at the usual quick speed it did with the Monitor Lizard cores. There was no difference whatsoever, confirming his thoughts from earlier.
The moment he saw there was no change, Uhtred immediately abandoned the manual’s instructions and refocused entirely on the metallic flecks he could feel around himself, though he still kept his attention on the passage of time.
He tried to latch onto the flecks, but this time, his focus wasn’t steady. He was trying too hard to monitor the time that was passing, while simultaneously trying to draw the metallic flecks towards himself.
