Chapter 25: Reward

Eric looked into the room in front of him as the door slowly opened.

What he saw was a large, dimly lit room akin to a storage warehouse. The ground floor's treasury was way larger than what he had expected.

"Take your time and choose whatever you want. If you don't know what something is, come and ask me outside." Darren informed Eric, as he closed the door and Eric was alone inside the large room.

Eric took a deep breath and started looking through all the items displayed on the various racks and shelves in the treasury.

There were all sorts of things like weapons, pills, crystals, along with some normal items not related to cultivation.

Since this was only the first floor, most stuff here was mediocre and there weren't many things here that Eric particularly liked.

He wasn't discouraged, though. He had explored only a small part of the area and was bound to find something good eventually.

The process of skimming through items was very easy for Eric. If he didn't know what something was, he didn't even need to ask Darren about it.

An item profile would always appear whenever Eric looked at something which he didn't know about. He could control the system based on his thoughts so there weren't useless pop ups about stuff which he already knew about unless he wanted to see the details of that item.

While looking around the Treasure Pagoda, Eric almost wasn't paying attention to the path which he was walking on and tripped on a fist-sized rock that was on the ground in front of him.

'What is this? Who put a random rock in this place? Can't the Treasure Pagoda even hire cleaners?'

Eric cursed to himself as he was a little annoyed.

His annoyed expression, however, soon changed to one of curiosity when a Scam System window appeared out of nowhere.

[Name: True Qi Stone (Sealed)

Status: Sealed

Description: ???]

'A True Qi Stone? What is that supposed to mean? Why is it sealed? Why is its description blank?' Eric was intrigued and he asked the system what the item was.

[The user's level and strength is too low to know this information.]

A rather frequently seen message graced Eric, who slightly frowned in disappointment.

Not having proper information on the item troubled him a bit, but Eric soon came to realize something about this peculiar stone.

Any information that the system didn't deem him worthy to know was related to something pretty important. The previous instances for this include the very reason as to why he was here in this game world and the secret of the three paths of cultivation.

'If this True Qi Stone is something even slightly as important as that stuff, it will benefit me a lot in the future once I know about it and how to use it.'

As Eric realized the potential value of the True Qi Stone, an idea suddenly came to his head.

He quickly gazed towards the door and saw that it was closed shut, with Darren standing on the other side of it.

Since the True Qi Stone was randomly lying around on the first floor of the Treasure Pagoda, it was highly unlikely that the people there knew what it actually was; the stone had most probably ended up there by chance.

'Nobody probably even knows of this stone's existence. They definitely won't notice if it went missing.' Eric's face grew a wicked smile as he quickly put the stone in his inventory and went back to searching for the best item in the treasury to take with him as his reward.

***

It had been about 10 minutes and Eric had found some pretty good items.

There were quite a few Cultivation Techniques for Soul Cultivation, Martial Arts for Body Cultivation and Mental Skills for Mind Cultivation; but Eric decided to ignore those for now.

Most of them were mediocre and he could get better techniques and such if he asked his father.

Other than that, since he was only at the second layer of the first realm in soul cultivation and only at the first realm of the first layer in the other two paths, he couldn't use any of these techniques, martial arts or skills at that moment in time.

With those options eliminated, Eric had a bottle of Qi Gathering Pills and a bottle of Fatigue Relieving Pills left to choose from.

The Qi Gathering Pills were pretty much self-explanatory. Qi Gathering Pills were cultivation pills made of Qi Gathering Herbs and had a slightly better effect than the raw herbs, but their basic function was still the same.

The Fatigue Relieving Pills were a little bit more complex. Once cultivators cultivate for a long time, they will build up fatigue, be it in the path of the soul, body or mind. With the help of the Fatigue Relieving Pills, they can get rid of this fatigue and save a lot more time than naturally recovering, which they can use for cultivation instead.

The special trait that these pills have is that they can be used to relieve the fatigue in the soul, body and mind. The user could choose if he wants to stabilize his dantian, refill his body with energy or rid his mental sphere of mental pressure.

Eric thought about the usefulness of both the pills to him in order to decide on which one of them he should finally pick.

First were the Qi Gathering Pills.

Eric's speed in cultivation, especially in the soul was very good already. The Qi Gathering Pills will just make it faster for him to gather qi, which will in turn increase the gap in his soul cultivation and the other two even more.

Even if he used the pills for the path of the body instead of the soul, it would still make him lag back in the path of the mind.

Next were the Fatigue Relieving Pills.

Eric had the least aptitude as well as the least time to cultivate the path of the mind. With the help of the Fatigue Relieving Pills, he could seriously increase how much time he was able to dedicate to cultivating his mind.

The reason why he isn't able to cultivate his mind for long is because of the headaches he starts getting due to mental pressure. With the help of these pills, he could overcome that major hurdle in the cultivation of the mind and seriously increase his cultivation efficiency.

'So, it's decided then.' Eric thought to himself, as he walked towards the door of the treasury, the bottle of Fatigue Relieving Pills in his hand.