One Last System

Grinding for hours just to see the slight increase in numbers? That\'s what I played the MMO games for.

Yet, as much as I could hate or love it, that\'s how the last two weeks of my life at the sect looked like.

Wake up in the middle of the night. Go train to the nearby pillar for four hours. Take a break and prepare some food before taking another four hours or rest while Mia did her part of training. Repeat the process once more before resetting it back for the sleeping schedule.

That\'s how my definitely not mundane and boring life looked like ever since I came up with that get-powerful-quick scheme. And while my stats climbed almost to their maximum numbers, I couldn\'t help but feel that my life... became somewhat stale.

"Damn it," Mia protested, pulling me out of the limbo of my thoughts. "Even now, it\'s really hard to focus!" she complained openly, no longer bothering with that master-slave bullshit.

"And that\'s likely why I believe only a few people in the entire academy bother to do that," I replied, despite not knowing how far or close to the truth my words were.

It was just an assumption, something I had no basis whatsoever for. But Mia didn\'t need to know about it, as my words were aimed only at encouraging her to keep working hard.

Especially with how the time for the next swap was coming soon.

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound of the girl\'s fist hitting the stone accompanied me for every moment that I was awake. They were also the sound that lulled me to sleep. With how used I was to it, it became nothing more but the background music of my mundane life.

"I think I\'m done for the turn," Mia said after a few more attacks. Her robes, as usual, were completely drenched. And as one would expect from an adolescent body of mine, it was something it had no other choice but to react to.

"Great, the fires are almost done," I replied, standing up from the spot where we cooked, slept, and spent the limited free time we allowed ourselves to have.

"To be honest, I\'m slowly growing to hate the taste," Mia complained a little, walking away from the training pillar and plopping down on her bottom right where I sat a moment earlier.

Her shyness was now almost fully gone. Most likely due to how we spent every moment awake together, she no longer seemed to care about the glimpses that I often couldn\'t hold myself from throwing at her see-through robes.

But this damned feeling of horniness still bothered me. Thankfully, there was a simple way to get rid of them.

"Before we make some money, I don\'t have any other recipes," I replied, approaching the stone.

\'Status,\' I thought, whipping out the windows that I was already extremely familiar with. Outside of Mia\'s body that I occasionally stole a peek at, those damned windows were the thing I paid most of my attention to.

BODY STATUS WINDOW

***

- Name: Arthur (Fian) Pendragon

- Age: 17

- Status: Hands wounded (treated)

- Hidden Status: Confused

- Body Status: Mortal

- Hidden Body Status: Apostle

***

PROGRESS STATUS WINDOW

***

- Body status: Mortal

- Growth status: Body Purification (Pristine body)

- Body status modifier:

- Endurance:71/100

- Willpower:32/100

Body Purification:497/300

{

- Skin Purification:100/100

- Flesh purification:100/100

- Bone purification:100/100

- Innards purification:100/100

- Core purification:98/100

}

***

Objective status window:

***

Ever since the total tally of my purification progress exceeded the soft cap of three hundred, my growth status changed a little. Yet, as great as the addition of a \'pristine body\' could sound, I noticed no effect on my performance whatsoever.

Maybe it was because I had no way of comparing my past and present self? While finding a way to stare at my reflection or just looking down at my own body was pretty easy, given how hard I had to work to raise each of those stats even by the tiniest amount, I couldn\'t notice any drastic change at once.

In a sense, looking at Mia could make it easier to figure out what did this growth of mine do... if not for the fact that I didn\'t really want for her to catch me blatantly staring at her.

I shook my head and turned my attention back to the pillar in front of me. With only three points away from filling the purification to its limit, I was quite eager to discover what would happen once I completed it.

Breathe in, hold the breath in my lungs and then slowly breathe out. This routine helped me to calm down and focus on the task at hand.

And then, just like thousands of times before, I struck forward with my right fist.

I infused all my strength into this strike. I did my absolute best to execute it as perfectly as I was capable. From my findings of two weeks ago, this was the only way to slowly raise the core purification status.

My knuckles struck the stone.

Tic.

Finally, the core purification statistic grew by one. According to my mostly guessed assumptions regarding the growth, I was now only twenty or thirty perfect hits away from bringing it to the maximum.

In other words, I could complete the first task I gave myself in less than an hour... If the assumptions that I made and that worked so far didn\'t turn out to be false.

"What is happening here?!"

Out of nowhere, just as I was about to strike the stone, an unfamiliar voice appeared in the garden.

\'The fuck?!\' Startled, I stopped my fist from hitting the stone, turning my head towards the source of the voice.

And standing right in the entrance of the clearing was a middle-aged man.

His face was strange. Despite clearly showing the signs of his age, it also made it seem as if the man was born just a week ago. That\'s just how perfectly clean his skin was.

Yet, the thing that instantly drew my attention wasn\'t the quality of his skin but his robes instead. Because rather than the washed-out blue that all the other disciples and I wore, his clothes were in the color of the clear sky.

And that could only imply one thing in a sect where one\'s clothes would change with one\'s rank.

"This humble disciple greets the elder!" I shouted out loud, cupping my hands together and bowing deeply.

It appeared that the last few punches of my training would have to wait a bit!