80 The East II (1/2)
Li looked at Sylvie. Her face looked down, and her hair, untied now that she wasn't out fighting or getting ready to fight, fell like silvery curtains that shrouded her expression. He gave her a few seconds to process the news before continuing.
”I know your dream was to visit the east, but there is no east anymore.”
Sylvie looked up again with a smile delicate with sadness gracing her lips. She hugged the worn leather bag containing the scrolls to her even tighter. ”Then that is all the more reason for me to cherish these. An entire continent's hopes that they will be remembered lie in them, after all.”
Li nodded. She was idealistic, but she was not a delicate little branch either. Years of fighting for her life had definitely tempered her ideals. ”You know, you took that a lot better than I thought you would.”
”Well, my dream is to travel the world, not just the east.” Sylvie looked westward, her pale red eyes widening as she looked not at the grassy horizon, but beyond, to lands never before seen. ”Perhaps I will go west, beyond the demonic furnacelands, or perhaps far north where they say the world ends, its waters spilling off into a great void of stars.”
”I was expecting you to feel a little more down.” Li motioned to Sylvie's bag. ”There were pretty interesting and useful things in there that I was going to let you know to cheer you up.”
”And to think I thought you once quite cold,” she remarked.
”I like to think myself as reasonable, not cruel. Most of the time, at least. If I'm the one that's going to be bringing you bad news, might as well balance it out with some good, and here it is: most of the information in those scrolls, you can pretty easily learn. It's all detailing the requirements for spells, skills, and classes.”
”I thought so. I could glean through most of the scrolls, and it did seem to me that they were all martial texts devoted to different paths of combat. Unfortunately, only one of the scrolls dedicates itself to Assassins.”
”That will end up being a blessing for you,” said Li. ”Based on how much of that scroll you can read, I can probably write out a translation in an hour or two. If you needed all three scrolls translated, then I'm not sure I'd have had the time to do it.”
”Truly?” She sounded happy like a child given gifts on Christmas.
”Consider this the minimum of what I'm willing to do to ensure you don't go dying on Old Thane.”
Li knew he could do far more for them. Have invincible summons just tail them, never letting them ever face real danger, but then what would be the point of their lives, their struggles? It would also bring unnecessary attention to him, and in general, it did not sit well with him to just baby the people around him. He could guide them, but he would not hold their hands.
He saw as Sylvie drew back a little, somewhat intimidated by the bare honesty of his words, but he did not want to give her any false expectations.
”Now, the scrolls are the easy part. It's the manuals that are rather interesting, even to me.”
The scrolls contained information Li was highly familiar with. All of it was game knowledge from Elden World. Many classes and skills required some level of roleplaying to acquire, and for a veteran expert like Li, it was not uncommon to be familiar with the requirements. Usually. It involved mundane mini quests. Learning an assassination skill, for example, might require landing the killing blow on five creatures at night time or something of that sort.
In this world, the requirements were the same, yet there were also philosophical elements added about having the right mindset to learn these abilities. An interesting thing to note was that there were guides for subclasses like Sword Saint or Asura in there, and those were pretty high level, limited to those who were level 70 warriors at the least. But of course, that was not the part that had truly interested Li.
”But the manuals,” he said. ”They talk about something entirely new. Something I'm not even sure you can learn.”
”Oh?” Sylvie started to learn forwards, her curiosity flaring up and washing away all her reservations.
”There's an entirely new power system detailed in there. It's not the magic you know about. Let me give you a rundown.”
Li explained.
The manuals were incomplete, but they gave a good idea of their content. It laid out a power system extremely similar to the kinds he knew about in Wuxia literature. It talked of cultivating qi and ascending realms to reach peerless strength and immortal refinement. This must have been where Sylvie had gotten all the misconceptions about flying immortals who could shatter mountains.
Like the superpowers the heroes held and the strangely advanced technology the elves commanded, it seemed the east had its own brand of unique strength completely unrelated to Elden World.
Li gave Sylvie a general explanation of the powers, but he did not go into detail.
”In essence, the goal is to continually cultivate this resource called 'qi' to grow more and more powerful. Think of it like a kind of super mana. Where for us, having more mana doesn't necessarily mean we're stronger, having more qi is a direct indicator of strength, among many other benefits.”