29 The Training Continues (1/2)
Shin Sumi had been in possession of the Copper Bell for about a year now. She remembered walking completely blind through the depth of the tunnel behind the waterfall.
The little nut had brought her to the bell for some reason, as a hunting animal would follow a prey.
Even since a single drop of blood from her finger ran along the carved lines of the bell, Shin Sumi knew she had become its master.
She had named it Copper Bell because of the tint of blood encrusted on the patinated surface. Originally the bell had been white and strange looking but its new color had made it seem like any normal bell one could find in the mortal world.
But even after many months, Shin Sumi had never had the occasion to test the bell's properties.
”The Copper Bell seems able to change the attribute of Shinsoo for its master. The ravine is dark, cold and silent but the bell allows me to see, hear and feel comfortable. The Myriad Sword Pavilion first shone so brightly that it was blinding but after a ring of the bell my vision was normal again” Shin Sumi recounted the facts she had gathered by experience.
”The first time the bell converted the Yin environment into a Yang sensation to achieve balance for me. The second time it was the opposite.”
Shin Sumi had a crazy idea in mind. It had popped up in her brain as soon as she realized the Yang attribute of the Outer Door she had just broken down.
If she was able to trick the door into thinking that her Shinsoo was of Yang type, she would be able to breakthrough swiftly. The Outer Door would then be a simple formality and she would need a lot less Shinsoo and patience in order to pass all the remaining twenty three openings.
For the Yin type doors, she would simply have to reverse the process, her original attribute being sufficient, she hoped.
All of these were mere conjectures but Shin Sumi felt smug. Maybe it could work!
Checking her inventory for how much resources she had left, Shin Sumi climbed out of the chasm once again. She would need at least a few trips out in order to gather enough resources for the opening of the Outer Doors.
And that was not even talking about the ten Spirit Doors that came after the Outer Doors.
”Judging by the change from Primal to Outer, I can't even imagine the ridiculous amount of cores needed to break open a single Spirit Door...”
If the difficulty had gone from one to ten by reaching the thirtieth door, then reaching the fifty fourth probably meant going from a tenfold to a hundredfold difficulty!
Concentrating her Shinsoo in her legs, Shin Sumi leaped through the forest, close to ten meters with each step. The leaves bristled as she flew past.
Shin Sumi had never really felt like an explorer before. She often preferred the comfort of what was around her, without surprises. The only two significant travels, if you could call them that, were when she left the Shin household in East Seaside Village and when she discovered the dark chasm on her first trip to the Dark Sky Starry Sect's training grounds.
Even now, although she had changed a lot over her entering the Immortal world, exploring was not really on her list of things to do.
The dark ravine that was always obscured by the strange Yin Shinsoo permeating the area had been explored a few times by Shin Sumi but never to its full extent. The same way, she had never tried to follow the scar that it formed in the earth from the outside. Until today.
It was more of a bother rather than a source of excitation for Shin Sumi. The fact was that after her constant fighting with the local spirit beasts, their population had diminished by quite a lot.
Each time she went out looking for battle she had found herself trying harder and harder to find interesting beasts that could give her resources.
”I guess the others are hiding from me now...” she thought.
Usually the beasts in the area were left to their own business. This part of the training grounds were only accessible for high level Honorary Disciples and sometimes Liquid Realm Disciples, although the latter preferred training in some of the sect's secret spatial dimensions.
The last few days though, Shin Sumi had been seeking adversaries relentlessly. At first, the beasts were angry and being very territorial, had tried to chase her away or kill her.
But with the level of intelligence associated with their bestial cultivation they had soon realized that she was more of a danger than anything else and had instead gone for the other obvious solution.
They hid away.
Now Shin Sumi had to go to a different place, hoping to find more beasts. She couldn't even imagine how the lower level beasts inside the red borders might feel like. Instead of having to deal with one individual, the animals must have been swarmed by thousands of disciples looking for battle experience.
She arrived to a point where the flat lands of the forests ended after a bit more than an hour of running at high speed. Taking a breath while looking at the scenery from the side of a small mountain, she rested for a bit.
”The Immortal world...” she murmured.
At her food laid the entire jungle. She could barely make out the mountains in the distance that formed the sect grounds. One of them was so high that it reached the neverending clouds.
Even at this distance, Shin Sumi was astonished to discover that the sky never seemed to appear. She was long since used to the gloomy light, even at high noon, but sometimes wished she could cast a glimpse of the clear blue sky she had grown under.
The whole forest area was just one of the sect's training grounds, and it had taken Shin Sumi a long time to cross completely. Adding the fact that her speed was at least ten times faster than that of a mortal on foot, Shin Sumi could only imagine the scale of the sect as a whole.
Even now, as she sat on the foot of the mountain, she was still deep within the confines of the Blue Mountain Range.
As if some kind of universal truth dawned onto her, for the first time she had an intuition about how big the world must be.
Following the change of the landscape, Shin Sumi met a bunch of new species. She was even attacked by a small goat with incredibly strong curved horns that pointed to the front.
The Rock Spear Mountain Goat had proven to be a good adversary but sadly had escaped Shin Sumi's sword when it realized that it was no match for the young girl.
Thankfully the nimble spirit beast wasn't the only inhabitant of this part of the mountain.
Little by little, Shin Sumi's stock of resources replenished, the grey nut adding new pages to its book.
As she fought new species, Shin Sumi discovered that the comfort she had found previously by being used to the same spirit beasts could have been dangerous, had she stayed in the same part of the forest for all of her training.
The same tricks and attacks wouldn't necessarily work on every target, and once more Shin Sumi felt her battle prowess climb steadily.
She was forced to leave the mountain after a particular incident though. As she was pursuing another Rock Spear Mountain Goat she stumbled onto a nest of insects the size of an infant's fist.
Having never fought a swarm before, Shin Sumi was at a loss when faced with a hundred or more flying jet black insects, their translucent wings thrumming with powerful vibrations.
The only thing Shin Sumi could do was running with all the speed she could muster. She waved her sword a few times behind her back but the small creatures evaded every of her swings.
It was only by jumping in a stream of mountain water that she was able to hide from the Black Wind Bees for long enough to make them lose focus and leave her alone.
If Shin Sumi's body had not been refined countless time with the best quality of spirit stones, her physical strength would not have been enough to allow her to escape and hold her breath underwater for this long.
She could only shiver at the thought of what state she would have been in if the bees had successfully attacked.
Shin Sumi was completely out of juice, her Shinsoo drained till her last drop, when she felt it was safe enough to leave the stream.
The sound of the Copper Bell, light and crystalline even underwater, had reminded her of what she had to do next as it provided her some warmth in the cold flowing water.
Shin Sumi walked in the obscurity of the night back to the chasm, for the first time in a long time needing the warnings of the little nut between her breasts, completely defenseless in the face of danger.
It made her realize that despite how far she had gone from being a mortal in a small village, life was something that could be taken away at any time in the cultivation world. There was always stronger, such was the cruelty of pursuing the Dao.
Shin Sumi fested upon her fresh crops until her Shinsoo levels were back to normal. Her cultivation base had long since stabilized since her last breakthrough.
”The only thing I need to do now is fill my dantian to the brim with spirit beasts cores and open as many Outer Doors as possible. But first...”
Shin Sumi took out the Copper Bell from her bag of holding. Holding it out in the darkest of night in the darkest place there was, Shin Sumi mused at how bright the bell appeared.