[...Ding]
[Reconstituting User's remains. Sacrificing Integrity, Consuming Remnant Celestial Mark.]
[Try not to explode next time, User.]
Lights flow deep into the world, swirling around some ashes. More lights follow, forming into the shape of a spade. The spade solidifies, followed by old fingers gripping it. Swirls of energy form bones, then neurons and musculature, followed by skin and hair and eyes.
Jackie takes shape under the massive influx of power from all over, resting with the spade on his chest, arms crossed. Shortly, Jackie's spirit appears sleeping above the body, then floats down and merges with it.
His heart starts and then pounds in his chest, his entire body glowing red-hot and sizzling in the ground. A moment later, he deflates back to being an old man with long white hair.
Darkness.
[Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!Ding!]
Jackie hears low pinging growing louder, rising in volume and intensity until it sounds like giants banging gongs next to his ears, causing his bloodshot eyes to snap open, "SHUT UP!" He shouts in his wheezy voice, only to realize that the sound vanished.
"Must have been my imagination." He looks around but sees nothing but black. "Have I gone blind? No, I can still see the System." He moves his hands and smacks against something a few inches away. He feels around, growing more alarmed.
"Buried Alive? Oh no no no! Help!" He grows anxious and starts smacking the dirt all around him, causing dust to fall onto him. He chokes and coughs and wheezes.
[Ding!]
[New Mission: The User is buried alive, use the Shovel to free yourself from your fate. Use Automatic Submission to feed the excavated material to the system and earn Shovel Points. One Cubic Meter of Dirt wins one shovel point. ]
[Skill Tree is now Unlocked. Submit shovel points to advance your Shovel Dao.]
Jackie pauses and squints his eyes at the new updates. "How did I get here? What a cruel joke!" He feels the spade in his hands and forms a mental image of the small shovel, "Hmm, it feels like my assault shovel, but much smaller. It's tiny."
"System-level 0? What in the world?! Integrity 1/50. I think the system levels up when the integrity is full? Maybe it also costs shovel points. Shovel points..."
He looks at the shovel points, "Oh dear! Basic Environmental protection is eating my shovel points, I guess it's to keep me from suffocating. Wait, no, I need to dig now! I'll suffocate if I stay here and run out of SP. Automatic Submission must mean something."
Jackie jams his spade into the hard ceiling above him, wiggling it while covering his eyes to keep the pile of dirt from smacking him in the face. He keeps jamming it and digging, widening the hole, then pauses, "No dirt has hit me? What's going on?" He opens his eyes to darkness again, but this time he sees a little brown wisp of energy float in.
"Oh! Oh!" His new memories pop up, and he identifies the brown wisp. "Yang earth spirit essense. I can see spiritual energy, celestial energy, spiritual force, and many other forms of exotic contamination. This isn't normal, cultivators must use their spiritual senses to catch a glimpse of the other side.
He turns to the hole and uses the light of the wisp of earth essence to punch his spade into the hole, digging out another chunk. The chunk gets sucked into the shovel head the moment he would have tossed it aside.
"So this is Automatic Submission." His defeated eyes brighten up, "I can use entrenching arrays while building a tunnel to the surface, holding it steady from collapse."
The old man gets more vigorous with his digging, soon widening out the area enough for him to stand. "Hmm, I've earned three shovel points. Digging straight up is suicide, but if I dig a spiraling tunnel, I can earn more shovel points and be able to take a rest without falling. How deep am I?"
Jackie crosses his legs and places the shovel before him. He closes his eyes and sinks into cultivation. "Look inside me. Dig out the impurities and guide the wanted exotics to reinforce the work."
He gazes inside of himself and sees a vast endless desert, waiting to be dug and sculpted. Five phantom shovels materialize inside his Vessel Forge. "Haha, Vessel Forge, but it's just an empty desert, the Vessel is buried." Jackie sighs.
Jackie uses the shovels to dig a complex trenching array inside his inner Vessel Forge, the final scoop of sand causing the mysterious array to light up, connecting with the buried Vessel, and gushes with power. His eyes snap open, golden light pouring out and splashing against the excavated wall and flooding the chamber, flowing up and up, phasing far overhead, continuing until the golden fluid in the vessel array dries up, causing him to stagger and fall over.
"Judging by the strata, I'm at least three kilometers beneath the surface."
Jackie blinks and stands up, digging at the wall and tunneling his way forward and around. "I seem to be gaining shovel points slightly faster than they are being consumed. I can't stop digging for a long rest, or I'll use up all of my points and suffocate to death!"
"Wait, this is a good chance to practice the one-hundred shovel stomps."
He drops into a digging stance facing the wall, recalling the information for the cultivation technique. He channels his shovel energy through his occult paths in his Vessel, causing one ghostly shovel to appear on the wall. Jackie rotates in place, kicking out with his right leg and smacks the ghostly shovel deep into the wall, then the old man hits down on the handle with his left palm, excavating a cubic meter of the earth in an instant.
He doubles over, "Ah ah," Jackie takes several deep breaths, "Too taxing, too taxing. This technique has one hundred of those? Insanity?! I can barely do one shovel stomp!"
His mind blanks a moment later, "Shovel energy? I channel shovel energy?"
Jacking sifts through the feelings, "So I convert all forms of foreign power into shovel energy. Celestial, divine, devil, spiritual, soul. It takes at least ten times as much energy to purify it into Shovel Energy."
"Haha, what a cheat!" He smiles smugly, chuckling like a dirty old man, then freezes, "Wait, Shovel Energy is no better than the original powers, gah, wasteful, just wasteful."
He resumes excavating the wall, watching as each scoop refils a little of his shovel energy while also giving him shovel points in the system. "Hmm, so I don't need Celestial Stones to quickly regain my energy, I can just dig."
He feels more vitalized and motivated the more he digs, the burning in his muscles waking him up and pushing him forward. "Hardworking Tyrant Excavator Body Forging is cultivated through hard labor, I feel myself getting stronger by the hour. "
He steps back and performs the shovel stomp again, resting then digging, forming a harmonious cycle as he digs for hours, then days. "Two shovel stomps, haha. Each advancement is much harder than the last."
He opens the system and then the Skill tree, "Hmm, I've reached qi condensation level 6 in 100 Shovel Stomps, Hardworking Tyrant Excavator Body Forging, Entrenching Arrays, Shimmering Chromed Shovel Soul Dao, and Eternal Shovel Vessel Dao. I suppose they just need shovel energy to advance."
He swipes the system away and focuses on escaping. "I'm so hungry. Look how skinny I've become, skin and bones. Will I make it out before whithering away? Those worms are starting to look like delicacies."
Several more days of digging pass. Jackie is licking his fingers. He plucks a worm out of the wall and slurps it down. "Mmm fantastic. Juicy. "
A month later, Jackie stuffs a fist-full of grubs and worms into his mouth then runs to the wall to dig out more. "So many, haha, what a find. This black soil is just fantastic, so much easier to dig than that grey stone earlier."
Three more months pass.
Jackie pokes the wall ahead and his shovel blasts through it, causing it to topple and reveal cold, crisp air.
He steps through it and gazes up at the starry sky. "It looks so beautiful." His lips tremble as he stuffs a handful of worms into his mouth, munching them like candy.
[Ding! The user has completed the Escape mission. System Store unlocked.]
Jackie lays down on the grassy land and stares at the dome of heaven, admiring the stars and constellations overhead. Wet streaks blot the dirt on his face while his lip trembles and his nose becomes stuffy.
"So I made it."
Jackie's tired eyes close. His breathing grows long and shallow as he rests through the night with the stars as his blanket and the ground as his bed.
The morning comes, warming up Jackie's old bones. His eyelashes tremble, and he wakes up. He opens his eyes, then squints and covers them with his hands, "Gah, it's so dadgum bright!"
He then pops his neck and settles into his cultivation position, holding his shovel across his lap.
Jackie closes his eyes and turns his vision inwards. He sees his Vessel Forge, a tremendous unending desert with a towering shovel embedded in the dried up earth. Five little shovels are busy excavating the titanic shovel, they all reveal the very tip of the blade at that moment, causing the shovel to glow with dazzling light.
The old man lights up, the air around him twists and turns, then starts rotating, kicking up a tempest. The floating lights and energies in the sky start rushing towards the vortex and into his body.
Jackie watches as clouds form over the desert inside his inner Vessel Forge, thunder and lightning crackle as the sun in his Vessel Forge is obscured by the converging clouds.
Boom! Lightning crashes across the Vessel Forge, and it starts to rain inside. The rain is made up of prismatic energies that splash down and puddle up, covering the inner desert in prismatic colors that fill and grow into streams and then rivers, followed by lakes and torrents of floods. The water level rises and rises until it drowns the massive Shovel Vessel in its new depths.
The rain continues as the clouds gradually disperse, hardening the water into a new layer of crystalline earth that shimmers with mysterious occult energies.
Jackie can see the shadow of his inner buried Shovel Vessel bearing the crushing weight of the new earth.
Outside, the vortex quiets down and fades away, revealing Jackie. He opens his eyes and stands up, flexing his muscles.
He stumbles a bit, "Now I'm a giant."
The old man stands three meters tall and is stark naked. His body is chiseled and is wrapped in dominating muscles. Jackie's shoulders are broad and robust. His body looks like it was used as inspiration for the statues of Greek gods, carved without an ounce of fat.
He clenches his fist, causing the air to crack from the might of his cultivated body.
"I feel like I did when I was younger." He rubs his wrinkly old face and tugs at his dirty white beard and long muddy white hair. "Dang, I'm still old."
"So this is the Foundation Establishment stage. I can be considered to have officially begun cultivation."
"I can Shovel Stomp three times now."
Jackie looks into the horizon and sees a lake, causing his eyes light up with glee
He spends the day walking, morning till noon. He washes up and cleans off the thick dirt and grime from his months underground.
Jacke steps out of the lake and reveals his olive, nearly bright gold skin, his white hair spilling down his shoulders and his fluffy white beard. He turns and looks at his reflection in the surface of the water. "I'm like an ancient bodybuilding Santa Claus, or an old Zeus."
The old man tugs his beard and looks at the water. "People build settlements near water. My heart hasn't acted up while I was escaping, I wonder if the system's mission had something to do with that."
He looks down at his naked body and his little brother swaying in the wind. "How embarrassing."
He opens the system, "Hmm, 19,252 shovel points."
He navigates to the Store and opens it, revealing long lists of items. "Dadgummit! Level 0 system only has some clothes and nicknacks in the shop."
"Well, That's all I need right now. I need to repair the system to get access to the other treasures."
Jackie selects a hanfu in the style of the Twilight sect, some good sturdy digging boots, wrist wraps, and a traveling hat. He dons his clothes and looks at the reflection in the water. "I feel like a wizard from Parry Lotter."
"Oh! I can buy Celestial Stones. Laymen use Common Celestial stones as currency. One hundred shovel points per stone. "
Jackie clears away the display and looks around. The purple grass covers the land up to the horizon, without a tree in sight. He walks the lake shore while contemplating the profound meanings of the shovel dao.
Jackie spends the afternoon walking and contemplating until he sees several columns of pale smoke rising over the horizon.