Chapter 455: Looking For The Escape
His eighth acupoint provided him with power equivalent to six normal acupoints.
Moon couldn’t hide his joy. This was by far the strongest acupoint in his body. The dual occupation of Tenacity and Dual Wielding, one running on mana, the other on spiritual energy, created an output that surpassed anything a single skill foundation could achieve. His next strongest were his initial two, each providing five acupoints worth of power.
Moon ran the numbers.
His first acupoint provided power worthy of five acupoints. Second acupoint. Five.
Third through sixth provided four each, totaling twenty-six. Seventh acupoint provided three, his weakest by far. And, last but not least, his eighth acupoint provided six.
"My total acupoint prowess is thirty-five."
Thirty-five acupoints from eight filled acupoints. His spiritual power rivaled a standard mid Three Star Evolver, and he had been an Evolver for less than a month.
The diminishing returns he had noticed earlier were still there. His seventh acupoint had provided only three standard acupoints worth of output, the lowest yet. But the eighth had shattered that trend entirely, proving that such foundations could bypass the curve.
"If I continue like this, I might reach Four Star before the tournament starts." Moon muttered, his eyes dropping to the remaining pile of spirit cores sitting on the floor before him.
There were still plenty left.
Moon settled back into his lotus position and picked up the next core.
He wasn’t wasting a single moment.
Moon consumed the remaining cores one after another. His spiritual energy climbed steadily, though the rate of absorption slowed as each acupoint filled higher. The denser the energy inside his latest acupoint became, the harder it was to pack more in.
Between cores, Moon practiced Cleanse. He cycled the skill through his ninth acupoint, weaving its threads into the foundation with the ease that came from having done this eight times before. What had once taken hours now took minutes.
Hours passed. The pile of spirit cores shrank until only fragments of spirit pavilion remained. The diminishing returns were obvious. Cores that had provided noticeable surges of power at the start now barely had an effect against his growing reserves.
But it was enough. His ninth acupoint filled to capacity with Cleanse as its foundation.
Moon rose from the floor and stretched, rolling his shoulders and dusting the grime from his clothes.
"My ninth acupoint provided three acupoints worth of power." He said, running the updated total. "I’m at thirty-eight."
He hadn’t crossed the Four Star threshold like he had hoped. Forty acupoints worth of power would have put him there, and he had fallen just short. The diminishing returns on his later acupoints were becoming a pattern he couldn’t ignore.
Still, thirty-eight was monstrous. If he fought the pavilion spirit again right now, the battle wouldn’t last a minute.
Moon looked around the empty pavilion. The shelves were bare. The cores were spent. The spirits were dead. There was nothing left for him to take from this place except the one thing he had come here for in the first place.
"Time to look for the teleportation mechanism."
Moon began his search. He walked moved through the pavilion, room by room, corridor by corridor.
The outer halls were sparse.
Stone walls, weapon racks emptied by the spirits who had rushed to fight him, and rows of low benches where the younger spirits had likely gathered.
Nothing of value remained.
He moved deeper, entering a corridor branching off the main hall, which led him to a series of smaller chambers.
They were living quarters, by the look of them. Each one contained a simple bed of woven material, a shelf, and a meditation circle etched into the floor. Moon checked every room. They were all empty of valuables or anything related to escaping this floating island.
The next floor down held the training grounds.
It was a wide, open space with high ceiling and training weapons.
Past the training grounds, Moon found what appeared to be a storage area. He stored everything worth taking in his ring without stopping to examine them closely. There would be time for that later.
He descended another staircase. The air grew colder, the walls narrower. This section of the pavilion had clearly been off-limits to most spirits.
The staircase ended at a single door.
Unlike the others in the pavilion, this one was intact. It was sealed by countless chains of high quality ores that wouldn’t break even if attacked by powerful weapons.
Of course, to Moon, these powerful chains, weren’t so powerful after all.
He struck the chain a few times, breaking it apart.
Clang!
The chains hit the floor helplessly.
Then, Moon approached the door, and pushed it open. The door opened into a small, circular chamber.
Moon stepped inside and stopped. The room was unique, nothing in comparison to the other rooms within the pavilion, and Moon could tell that much instantly.
At the center of the room, sitting on a stone pedestal, was a book.
It was old. Really old. Its cover was made of a material Moon had never seen before, dark and withered, yet smooth. Faint lines of script ran along its spine in a language he didn’t recognize.
But it was the aura coming off it that made Moon’s breath catch. The book radiated spiritual energy. Dense, concentrated, and far purer than anything the spirit cores had contained.
Moon’s eyes drifted along the room, and his eyes landed on what almost looked like two levers, but made off of a tree branch. The branch was embedded into the wall.
Moon walked closer and activated Eye of Truth on the book, curious as to what such a book contained.
[Hidden Information: You have stumbled upon a natural treasure. This book allows those that can use it to control the floating island’s horizontal or vertical movement. To control this treasure, you need to bind it to your self, understand the language within and have huge reserves of mana in order to activate it.]
