In the second tutorial, the military man began shooting into a target 10 meters away, while carefully explaining all the technicalities of how to aim and how to shoot. Meanwhile, Alex's system was in overdrive.
[You observed the basic shooting practices with attention. Your familiarity with the gun has risen. Gun Technique + 1]
...
[You observed the basic shooting practices with attention. Your familiarity with the gun has risen. Gun Technique + 1]
As Alex went past tutorial to tutorial, the army man kept explaining tips on how to improve accuracy, how to plan a shot and other minutiae. After going through the 10 basic tutorials, Alex had rapidly improved in his gun technique that even shocked himself.
[Gun Technique 100/100]
[Congratulations, You have unlocked skill - Gun Technique (Ordinary)]
Alex had acquired his first ordinary grade skill and it was all thanks to this system. Alex quickly realized the ramifications of this. Didn't this system turn Alex into a martial genius? He could learn skills by simply observing others teach him!
After the tutorial, the VR assistant returned.
"Now that you have gone through the basic tutorial, you are welcome to try the two modes currently unlocked based on your skill level. The first is the Shooting Tower and the second is Versus Tower."
After going through the details of the two modes, Alex decided to first try the Shooting Tower since it was a single player mode. This mode started out relatively simple, it was a single player target practice style mode, where one tried to advance through the tower.
The first level in the Shooting Tower was simply a target at 10 meters distance and a trainee pistol with six bullets.
After the timer ran out, Alex quickly pumped all six bullets. His gait as stable as a mountain and the recoil perfectly integrated into his motions so as to cause no false deviations. It was like a person who had used guns for a long time, in stark contrast to his performance in the beginner test. After the six shots had been fired, Alex saw that all had hit the dead center of the target.
"Congratulations on clearing level 1. Proficiency 100%"
Soon, Alex was taken to the second level. This time the distance was 20 meters away. Once again, Alex shot all six perfectly.
Soon Alex was now on the 10th level, the target was actually at a hundred meters distance, which was just beyond the 95 meter accuracy limit of the pistol. After the intimation, he shot again. His bullets hit the target, but just barely. He once again cleared the level with 100% proficiency, but this one was much more challenging to accomplish and he achieved 100% proficiency on his third try of this level. He realized that not aiming directly, but anticipating trajectory was key to improving accuracy as well.
Achieving 100% in the first ten levels, Alex actually received 100 Glory Points, which could be used to redeem tutorials for Uncommon Grade Gun Technique. Alex was feeling tired and decided to stop for the day.
After leaving the virtual reality, Alex realized that his spirit felt exhausted. "Shooting is a high concentration activity that consumes the mental spirit. Learning via the system also seems to consume the spirit." Alex realized. He decided to go to the training room to do some mechanical exercise to refresh himself. Besides getting stronger he also had another goal, which was to become fit and lose weight!
After a day of exhausting hard work, Alex went to sleep. 'Luckily' he had no unfortunate.mishaps other than the one in the bathroom. After a good night's rest, Alex woke up early morning to cultivate Crazy Immortal Sutra but felt like cultivation had slowed to a crawl.
"What happened? Why is it so slow to cultivate now when it was so rapid yesterday?" Alex wondered before going online to clear up his doubts. After a few searches and browsing through some forums, Alex finally understood.
The Crazy Immortal Sutra improves fleshy body strength by absorbing bad luck. To cultivate, there actually has to be bad luck accumulating in your vicinity. Since Alex had already absorbed all the bad luck around his area yesterday night, there was no bad luck around to absorb anymore and cultivation had slowed down accordingly.
"Looks like I need to cultivate in school today. There are tons of people in school, so there should be enough bad luck for me to absorb." Alex mumbled, but immediately became bitter. What a life he was leading, intentionally trying to attract bad luck.
This time, when he freshened up, he was more careful of not having any bad luck mishaps and it was uneventful. However, while eating breakfast, he suddenly felt the shivers and immediately became alert. Suddenly, he felt his throat choke from the food and immediately tapped on his mom's arm to warn her.
Her mom looked at his paling face in shock and immediately used her energy force to force the clump of food out by slapping his back. Alex entered a coughing fit before eventually calming down.
"Are you okay, son?" She asked with some worry.
Alex nodded as he calmed down. "I'm fine now. This Crazy Immortal Sutra is truly a messy one. But I have noticed that I'm usually only struck with one luck based mishap a day. I just need to be more careful."
Alex's mom looked at him in pity. If it was possible, she wouldn't allow her son to practice this blasphemous cultivation technique, but she could only swallow her fears for now as she could see that Alex had truly improved in health and even his decadent behavior seemed to have turned around in a couple of days.
In school, Alex quietly sat during the lectures and began to cultivate. Cultivating in class was not very abnormal and a lot of students did it. Usually it was rude, because it could easily be sensed that someone was cultivating as it caused a huge transfer of energy.
Only, in Alex's case, cultivating Crazy Immortal Sutra caused no visible notification at all. Since the cultivation technique relied on mobilizing bad luck, which was an undetectable and unidentifiable concept, a large transition of luck wouldn't be detected at all.
As Alex ran the cultivation technique, a terrible amount of bad luck poured into Alex's body and was strengthening him. However, despite the amount of bad luck being terrible, Alex noticed that the amount of bad luck required to go from ordinary grade 1 to grade 2 was much more than grade 0 to grade 1.
At the same time, Alex realized two more things. Practicing the Crazy Immortal Scripture allowed allowed Alex to become more attuned in sensing bad luck, which gave him insights into why he was able to sense that he was going to have a mishap. The second was probably even more so, that when the bad luck within his body accumulated to a limit, it would be consumed to cause a mishap and then his body would be drained of bad luck, which would then be refilled again by cultivation.