Chapter 4: Blood and Combat
Chen Wei carefully takes out his vital gu from its pouch and, with a wave of his hand, he approaches one of the blood containers and submerges himself in it.
"This shouldn't be too difficult since it's just a rank 1 refinement," he controls the gu to absorb about half of the blood inside the container.
Chen Wei then removes the gu from the blood and tosses three primeval stones into it before adding the processed bloody flowers into the mix.
The gu begins emitting a strong blood-red glow as it enters the crucial stage of refinement.
"Well, now it just depends on my luck." Fortunately, the gu succeeded on the first try; his luck wasn't so bad today.
Chen Wei looks at the gu, shaped like a scarlet blood drop, feeling happiness and pride after his first successful refinement.
A few days later, Chen Wei is sitting in a circle with other students while observing two of them engaged in physical combat with determination.
Chen Wei is focused on trying to learn as much as possible regarding practical combat here at the academy.
Of course, it's not like he hasn't practiced combat in the past ten years of his life in the gu world. In fact, when he turned eleven, his father began training him personally on a regular basis.
But he knows he still has much to improve to be considered a master in close combat.
And the best way to enhance his skills is to constantly spar with people of similar abilities.
However, in the academy, those with the same combat level as him are few, mainly descendants of elders or powerful families.
The fight ends with one of the youths, who seems to have a more robust physique from manual labor, winning by a narrow margin.
"Chen Wei! Bai Zi! Both of you come to the center and fight!" The combat instructor points to the middle, waiting for the two to comply.
Chen Wei walks to the center of the ring while assessing his opponent, a skinny boy of average height who seems to be trembling with nervousness.
"Chen Wei, rank 1 Grade A, greets my opponent!" He makes the customary clan combat salute.
"Bai Zi, rank 1 Grade D, greets my opponent!" The boy speaks before quickly launching an attack, trying to catch Chen Wei off guard.
Chen Wei easily dodges the clumsy punch from the boy, who obviously has little combat experience, while pretending to attempt a punch to his face.
Bai Zi quickly focuses all his attention on defending his face, giving Chen Wei the opening to deliver a full-force kick to the side of his knee, causing him to lose balance and fall to the ground screaming in pain.
Chen Wei doesn't give him a chance to recover and immediately moves in, raining punch after punch on his face until the instructor stops the fight and declares him the winner.
Chen Wei returns to the group of students and sits back down as the instructor calls two other students to spar.
He's disinterested in the fight as his thoughts are more on his recent practice with the Blood cut gu over the past few days.
In fact, the practice he had over the past few days has given him many ideas and inspirations to develop the blood path in the future.
Besides starting to gain practical experience in the Blood path and its advantages like easy nourishment, low resource requirements for development and refinement, as well as incredible attacking power...
And speaking of novel knowledge, most of it can't be used now.
For example, despite knowing about the luck path, he has yet to see a gu from this path, despite his efforts to find them.
The same goes for the Wisdom path because while he managed to find various gu from this path, they always lead to endless development ahead, besides not having any wisdom path inheritance in his clan.
And although he has ideas about various inheritances, they are either from the future or far from where he lives, and he lacks the strength to obtain them if they were nearby anyway.
"The problem ultimately lies in the lack of strength," Chen Wei sighs, knowing that until one reaches rank 8, they will never be truly strong in the gu world.
And even rank 8 is only strong conditionally, assuming there's no Venerable in the world, and even a Venerable still has to kneel before the face of death.
"Fang Yuan... what would that old demon do if he were in my place?" Of course, he's not a sentimental and kind person, but he thinks he would never be able to massacre his entire clan to increase his aptitude.
"Speaking of which, the most useful knowledge so far has been about the liquor worm since it fortunately exists in this era." In fact, without Chen Wei's knowledge, the Wine Emperor, who created the Three Sovereign Five Emperor Wines that legend says can elevate the liquor worm to rank 8, is still alive in this era.
One of the few recipes he still remembers from the novel is how to advance the liquor worm from rank 1 to rank 4.
In fact, Chen Wei knows his grandfather has already bought one for him and said he would receive it as a gift if he's the first to reach the middle stage of rank 1.
This will definitely be one of his greatest advantages when he reaches rank 2 and refines the Four Flavors Liquor Worm that only he will have. In fact, he already has ideas on how to use the liquor worm to transform it into a blood path gu.
It may seem like an obsession for Chen Wei to try to turn everything into a blood path, but besides trying to develop the path, there's something more: Dao marks!
This is among the most important knowledge he gained from the novel, especially regarding how important they will be for immortal cultivation.
And since he plans to become an immortal in the blood path and lacks the advantage Fang Yuan has of non-conflicting Dao marks, he will need a wide variety of blood path methods.
Plus, in this era, nobody has means against blood path methods yet, although it's not as great an advantage as the Dream path, it's still a good advantage.
And for now, Chen Wei is primarily focused on trying to modify existing gu to fit the blood path rather than trying to create a completely new gu.
But regarding the liquor worm and reaching rank 1 middle stage, Chen Wei estimates it will take him at most a month to reach this stage, and considering he spends a lot of time practicing gu, it could be even faster.
At this rate, he will achieve one of the goals in his long-term plan, which, if he had an A-grade aptitude, is to reach rank 2 by the end of the year.
And when he gets there, that's when he can start expressing one of the main advantages of Four Flavors Liquor Worm when he wil cultivate much as faster as others using the liquor worm.
In fact, Chen Wei hopes to have reached rank 3 in just three more years, still in time for the next wave of beasts from Longhua Shan Mountain.
After a full day of fights, the academy students receive their allowances of three primeval stones and are sent home.
Chen Wei doesn't give himself a moment of rest, and from the moment he arrives home until bedtime, he cultivates, stopping only to eat and attend to basic needs.
This leaves Chen Wang, his grandfather, extremely proud, weighing how lucky the Chen family is to have such a talented and hardworking young man.
Little does he know that part of his beloved grandson's plan is to take full advantage of the nourishment from the clan but abandon the clan and his family and never look back once he becomes an immortal.
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