38 - Beast hunting

(From now on, I will be changing the way beasts are referred to. They are now just called rank 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on beasts. The rank is just the rank of the martial arts path that they are. AKA a high tier one star silver rank beast would be a high tier rank 4 beast. The same is going for techniques, skills, etc.)

Su Tao sat there and cultivated the quality of both his water inner energy and his lightning inner energy at the same time.

While he was doing that, he also took out one of the other books that he took.

"Lightning knuckles: Gather the lightning inner energy around the knuckles to make your hit more concentrated. Improves power slightly while reducing damage taken in the fists. Low tier rank four skill. Medium precision required."

Su Tao then read the whole book and started to gather the lightning inner energy in his fists, directing it to his knuckles in the way that the book said.

From the outside, it looked like the yellow barrier around his knuckles had gotten brighter, but this was just the skill at work directing the inner energy better than just a simple barrier for the fist. This was an extremely low level technique and was only suitable for introducing him to directing lightning a little better.

Su Tao then spent the rest of the day practicing with the lightning knuckles and increasing his proficiency with directing lightning.

Then, after a night of rest, he took out the crackling fist book. He then read through the contents and memorized them. It took a lot longer for him to memorize a skill this complicated, so it took about two hours to fully memorize. After all, even though he had a much faster mind, it still took a lot of energy and time to memorize something complicated like this.

Normal people would have taken at least half a month to the full month that they had the book to memorize its content, but Su Tao had done so in only two hours, showing just how fast his mind was. It also helped that his eyes could partially imprint this information in his mind visually.

It was like seeing a complicated painting. Most people see the painting in person and they can see all the details down to the smallest little section, but they could only remember the general look of the painting in a glance, whereas Su Tao could remember most of the painting and some of the details in a glance, which helped him a lot.

It was like each tiny section of the painting was its own painting that he could memorize the general look of in order to get a much better general idea of what the painting looked like overall. (Sorry if this is confusing)

However, at the end of this skill was a warning. "Warning: This skill is incomplete, and any error could result in severe nerve damage."

Su Tao could not help but wonder what the full skill was if this one was incomplete, or if there even was a full skill. He could not help but have questions about it, but they weren't going to answer themselves, so he moved on.

Then, for two days, Su Tao practiced using the lightning inner energy in the way that the crackling fist described, and he managed to do it without any issues.

This was because his eyes could see his inner energy as long as it wasn't in his body, allowing him to fix all the minor mistakes he could see, while slowly fixing the ones that he couldn't

At the end of these two days, Su Tao's fist was glowing much brighter than before all across it and there was a faint outline of an image on it, as if there was a faint gauntlet on his hand made of inner energy.

This was the crackling fist. It directed the inner energy to make a stronger fist that could numb the enemy even if the fist didn't break through the defense of the opponent's inner energy.

He then went to sleep, and when he woke up, he went around and hunted a bunch of middle and high tier rank four beasts, throwing them in a pile onto the large sled he had bought. He could now take many more than two beasts at the same time, which would greatly increase his speed.

On top of those beasts on the ground, he had shot down a few bird beasts with his bow. If it was within a hundred yards, Su Tao wouldn't miss no matter what. Even if the bird beasts saw it and tried to dodge, they would still get hit and killed.

He ended up killing more than 90% of the beasts with his bow, including the high tier beasts. Because they were not smart, they wouldn't be able to figure out where the arrows came from before they died, making them an easy target.

The only problem was that they had tough defense, which made it hard for Su Tao to kill them without the power of his eyes. However, he still managed to do so with about five to ten arrows per beast.

Whenever he killed them, he would take back the arrows he shot, and they rarely got broken, meaning that he didn't waste any arrows killing them.

This time, he didn't go gather resources since that took too long and wasn't as rewarding as the high tier beasts that he could kill much quicker than he could gather resources.

And with the addition of the bow, he was able to kill them even faster.

Very quickly, he managed to clear the area around him within a thousand yards in every direction of high tier beasts, so he put them all on the sled and started to drag it back to the City of Silver Sparrow. He had gotten a total of about eight high tier beasts as well as two more valuable middle tier beasts that were of the same value.

The reason that there were so many high tier rank four beasts was because he had gone very far into the forest almost to the area where rank five beasts lurked.

But Su Tao quickly dragged the sled of beast corpses out of there and back to the City of Silver Sparrow. It only took him half a day to get there, which was much much faster than before.

When he was seen dragging in the corpses of these beasts, people couldn't help but be surprised.

When he came to the market and was going to sell them to the person at the same shop as before, he once again put them on the counter.

However, before the attendee even had the chance to speak, Su Tao spoke his own side.

"This time, you're going to give me what they're worth, not what you think a little kid thinks they're worth."

Before the attendee had even spoken, he had already revealed that he knew that he was ripped off last time. The attendee could do nothing about this, so this time he gave him a fair price.

He realized that this boy wouldn't let him rip him off again, and if he tried to do so, Su Tao would just go to another shop to sell the beasts. After all, this business was obviously not exclusive.

From that batch of beasts, Su Tao got a total of five gold piece. In reality, the beasts were worth four times what he had been given last time, and two of them were worth even more than the rest, garnering an entire extra gold piece for them.

Nobody knew how he had managed to kill all these beasts, but they ignored it since Su Tao was just far too weird for anybody to be able to properly size him up.

They were also all aware of Su Tao's terrifying archery skills, and they could see that most of the beasts were killed by five to ten arrows to the head. So they assumed that he had just worn them down with arrows until he could pierce the inner energy barrier of the beast with an arrow and kill it from there.

In reality, this was partly true. Su Tao couldn't pierce the inner energy barriers of the beasts on his own even with the lightning inner energy, so he used the lightning inner energy to disrupt the flow of inner energy in the beasts and weaken their inner energy barrier before killing them with five to ten arrows that had the ability to now pierce through the weakened barriers.

After all, the inner energy of a beast was not of any element and was much weaker than normal inner energy. Otherwise, Su Tao would find it quite hard to beat a high tier one star silver rank cultivator of the same strength without the power of his eyes only using his bow.

He then went to the martial arts pavilion and returned the books he had taken before. The attendee was surprised that he returned them so fast, but when he thought about the fact that it was Su Tao, who nobody was able to properly measure, he found it reasonable.

Su Tao then went to the second floor of the martial arts library and looked through more skills.

The average medium tier rank four skill was about two gold pieces each while a high tier was about ten gold pieces. As for peak tier skills, they were about fifty gold pieces each.

Above that, low tier rank five skills were worth about five bronze notes each. From this, you could see their value.

Su Tao could earn this money many times faster than other people due to his proficiency in hunting high level beasts. However, it would still take him a while to be able to afford everything that he wanted.

As such, Su Tao simply picked out the techniques that he was interested in getting this time.

"Spark step: Use lightning inner energy to speed up the body. Increases speed to twice as fast. Top middle tier rank four skill. Requires high lightning inner energy purity and high precision and comprehension. If used incorrectly, can cause hidden damage to the body."

"Flowing essence technique: Used to refine water type inner energy and make it flow better through the body with much higher quality. Top middle tier rank four technique. No requirements."

Su Tao picked these two because they would help him a lot.

Because the spark step was of the lightning element which was rarely cultivated and because it was dangerous and required high comprehension, its price was very cheap at one gold piece despite being a top middle tier skill.

This was balanced out with the flowing essence technique, which was also a top middle tier rank four technique. It was priced at three gold pieces and fifty silver pieces.

Su Tao then brought these two books to the old attendee at the front of the martial arts library, and he paid the price required to take them.

This surprised the old attendee because he had no clue where Su Tao's money was coming from. The martial arts library was not near the market, so he naturally didn't know about Su Tao's beast hunting yet since it hadn't spread yet.

Su Tao then spent the remaining fifty silver pieces to get a better bow.

Su Tao then went back into the woods again, and he was once again followed. Once again, the people following him were slaughtered without much of a chance to resist.

However, one of them had something extremely good on them this time.