Chapter 6 – First Battle
46th Winter Year 2500
Wayne got out of his room towards the meeting place. He planned on wearing his previous clothes but scratched that plan as he saw how serious the examination was. He bought simple leather equipment from the shop inside the dungeon and wore them.
The leather equipment might not be that good but at least it showed that Wayne had prepared for the exam. He walked towards the meeting area and he saw a few other examinees walking towards the same direction too.
As he got there, a few others had been waiting for a while. He was not the earliest but he was still early. Most that had already arrived thought the same thing. It was better to come early than late.
It was 5:45 am and more and more examinees arrived. Five minutes later, everyone had arrived. All of them came early because they knew the exam was strict. They did not want to get their marks deducted from being late.
As they were waiting, it was 6 am and 'whoosh!' Monica fell from the air shocking everyone. Monica looked at all the examinees and nodded. She was satisfied with their performance for coming early.
"The third test part 1 started now," Monica announced, and on her hand was a scroll. She opened the scroll and inside it was a complex magic rune. The rune shone immediately when she channeled her energy and on the ground below the examinees, the same rune appeared.
None of the examinees were panicked because they knew the rune was for the random teleportation. Even so, they took a deep breath as they would possibly get dizzy similar to the day before.
They disappeared one by one from the assembly area. The same with Wayne. Once Wayne was teleported, his leg suddenly got inside ankle-deep water. The environment was swamp and everywhere in the dungeon was a swamp, it was filled with water.
There were lands and Wayne needed to find one fast because he did not have any experience fighting monsters and having his first fight in the water was not a good idea. It would be dangerous to a first-timer like him.
Even so, he did not rush. He moved slowly and calmly so as to not attract any monster. Wayne knew the Hunter Association had cleaned most of the strong blue python but it did not hurt to be careful as he was merely a beginner.
After 30 minutes of walking, Wayne found a land. He decided to make the small land his base. He set up his tent there and prepared to explore the area around the land. He needed to find some low-level blue python to test his power. He worked hard to prepare his skills and he wanted to see how effective they were.
Even so, he did not rush to get his experience. He first inspected the land using Precious Touch to find if there would be something wrong on the land, for example, a poisonous plant. Wayne did not have any appraisal skill but his Precious Touch could appraise anything he touched.
As he was inspecting the land, he found a few poisonous plants. He plucked them out and decided to use subtraction and division to remove the poison. If the poison was simply in the plant because of outer interference, subtraction was fine.
However, if the poison was bound on the molecular level, the division was a better choice. Once he extracted the poison from the plant, Wayne was surprised to find out something new about the special skill.
"Whoa~ I can use these if I want to make equipment with a poisonous effect. I can also sell this for research," said Wayne while he held the extracted poison in his hand. The poison turned to crystal once Wayne extracted them. He did not know that subtraction and division would turn the poison like that.
"If I collect more of these poisons, it will help fight monsters," thought Wayne. He decided to collect all the poisons he could find on the land. Once he collected enough poison, he used addition and multiplication to create a more potent poison.
"… What is this guy doing??" A hunter tasked in guarding Wayne was looking at him weirdly. He saw Wayne did something but had no idea what he was doing. The hunter assumed that Wayne was collecting food but he recognized all those plants as poisonous.
"Should I tell him?" The hunter thought but dismissed that idea immediately because recognizing the plants as part of the test too. "I will save him once he is poisoned," said the hunter.
Wayne kept collecting the herbs with poison and extracted the poison. As for the herb he collected, he would eat them because they were nutritious once the poison was extracted. An hour later, he collected a lot of herbs on the small land. He stored them all in his small, 1 cubic meter storage.
After that, he did not leave the land looking for a monster. Instead, Wayne checked on the minerals available on the land including the soil, rocks, and a few small crystals he could find on the small land.
He might find some useful minerals he could use. Be that as it may, he found out none of them were collectibles and useful. Wayne was disappointed but he remembered that the dungeon had been inspected and explored by the hunters. It was not a surprise that he could not find any useful minerals in the dungeon.
With all of that out of the way, Wayne decided to explore the area around the land. He was looking for monsters to fight but he also did not get idle and let his chance of appraising the plants, water, and soil of the swamp.
When Wayne found something useful, he decided to take them and stored it in his storage. Even so, he soon discovered that his storage was almost full. Wayne stopped collecting everything and decided to collect rare things.
"I want to upgrade my storage," Wayne needed the storage upgrade fast but he would need 10 normal rank cultivation gems to upgrade his storage. Wayne kept moving forward until he felt something moving in the water.
Wayne got alert and prepared himself for battle. Wayne stared at the place where the movement was located. The water moved slowly and from the movement on the water, Wayne could see that something long was moving silently towards him.
"The blue python," thought Wayne and he was nervous. This was his first battle and he could not help to feel nervous because he never met a monster in his life. He saw videos of monsters in the dungeon but watching it and encountered it was two different things.
"Phuu~" Wayne took a deep breath. He was not sure if it was the original blue python or a mutant blue python but he had a feeling that the monster coming towards him was the normal one because the hunter would not let the examinees encounter the mutant as their first encounter.
"I will strike it first!" Wayne made his decision and activated his monkey jump skill and launched himself from the water into the air. As he got above the water, he saw clearly that it was indeed a snake movement from the water.
"Upward jump skill?" The hunter looked towards Wayne and nodded.
Wayne fell right towards the python and he used the jab skill immediately and punched into the water. His attack landed directly at the head of the python and the python got angry.
The blue python tail launched toward Wayne. It emerged from the water and the beautiful blue pattern of the blue python appeared but Wayne had no time to admire that pattern. As he saw the tail coming at him, Wayne used monkey jump again and evaded the attack.
The tail splashed the water and Wayne's visibility of the python disappeared. Moreover, due to the cloudy water, Wayne could not see the blue python at all.
Suddenly, a massive mouth passed through the water barrier towards Wayne. "Damn it!" Wayne could not move midair which he realized was a big mistake using the monkey jump to jump that high when he did not have any method to evade the snake without any footing.
Wayne's only method was to block the mouth with his hands. Wayne grabbed the blue python's mouth and immediately felt the massive strength the python had. Shocked, Wayne removed his intention to block the mouth and instead opted to divert the mouth to his side.
The blue python missed Wayne and it fell on the water and slithered into the water and immediately launched another attack towards Wayne.
At the moment the blue python fell, Wayne had landed on the swamp and he found a lot of problems he needed to counter. First was the location of his fight. Fighting in the swamp was a bad choice. He had no experience in fighting on solid ground, not even any experience in fighting monsters but he dared to fight a monster in the swamp.
His skills were chosen without thinking of the environment and the best place to use his skills was on solid ground.
The second was the power the blue python emitted. Wayne had no idea the average level of the python but he knew that it was not level 1. From the brief exchange of strength that happened earlier, he was sure that the python had at least an average level of 2.
Even if the average level was 2, that did not mean all of the blue python's status was level 2. Some of them might be level 1 and the others might be level 2 or 3 or perhaps one of its statuses was level 5 or 6. Wayne had no idea what level was the python but he knew that the strength status of the blue python was in the range of level 2 to level 4.
He had no idea how strong a level 2 to level 4 strength was but he assumed it was at that level based on his measly E- level 1 strength. Once Wayne landed on the swamp, he realized that there was water.
"Will my flowing water step work in the water?" Wayne thought but he decided to use it immediately. He would not know if he did not try. "My energy will drain a lot, so, I need to limit the usage of the skill I used!"
The blue python attacked Wayne again but Wayne immediately used a flowing water step and he immediately felt that his body was one with the water and easily evaded the blue python attack. Even so, he could feel the energy drain from his body but did not lax and launched a few jabs at the blue python.
"Hiss!!!!" The blue python screamed in pain and Wayne immediately got the hint that even though the python's strength was high, the endurance was on the same level as Wayne. "Nice!" Wayne saw a light of hope to win the battle.
As his first jab landed, Wayne continued with the second, third, and fourth jab. He launched the fifth jab and to his surprise, he punctured the blue python body immediately. "I forgot that my jab is not normal!" Wayne felt happy that it did not take him long to injure the python.
The fight continued and Wayne slowly punctured the python's body with his jab. When he ran out of energy, he immediately drank a potion. He knew that his skills cost a lot of energy due to them having high grades and thus, he prepared a lot of energy potion to restore his energy during a fight. Once his average status was higher, he could use the skills better.
The fight continued and Wayne landed his last jab on the python's head before the python died completely. "Huff, huff, huff," Wayne was panting heavily. He used a lot of energy in the fight.
"I did it! My first battle!" Wayne clenched his fist as he succeeded in his first battle. It was a hard battle especially for a beginner like him. Even so, he was proud of his achievement.
"Not bad. For a beginner's first battle, I can give him an 'A'. The only downside is that he had low energy. He drank a lot of energy potion when he only used jab and water flowing steps. Those two are weak skills but he needs lots of energy potion. Is his status all G-?" The hunter guarding Wayne wondered.
He was an experienced hunter and he knew about the two skills used. From what he knew, no matter how low their status would be, it was impossible to lose a lot of energy for weak tier 1 skills like jab and flowing water step.
"Hmm~ Is it possible that these two skills are not the common jab and water flowing skill?" The hunter was thinking while looking at Wayne dragging the python's body ashore.
"Now that I think about it, he did easily break through the python's defense in four to five jabs when normally it will take sixteen to twenty jabs for someone at his level," the hunter smiled. "If he is not chosen by the marker crystal, we might get a strong hunter on our side."
Wayne was panting while he dragged the blue python's body ashore. The one he fought was not a small blue python. It had a length of six meters with a body thickness of nearly 100 centimeters. That was a massive and fat python.
Once Wayne managed to get the python's body ashore, he fell on the ground panting. He was tired. "This thing is heavy…" Even so, Wayne was smiling. Not only because he won his first battle but he also found something else about precious touch.
"What an OP special skill," thought Wayne. When he touched the dead body, he had an idea and tried using Precious Touch and to his surprise, he could fix the dead boy and also extracted the skills, cultivation technique, and essence of the blue python using division.
"If I can fix the monster's body, I can sell them for a high price. That is money. If I can extract the skills, I will not need to spend money on buying skills and can farm skills by myself. With the essence extraction, I can get new talents easily," thought Wayne.
When someone awakened, they could have more than one talent. To cultivate the talent they wanted, they would need the cultivation technique related to the talent. They could choose to cultivate one, two, or even a hundred talents. It was all their choice.
Even so, most hunters and explorers would choose to cultivate three to five talents. The reason was simple. Resources. To cultivate that many talents, they would need a lot of resources and it was time-consuming to get the resources, and thus, hunters and explorers did not choose to cultivate hundreds of talents.
For someone who gets only a few talents when they awakened, they could get more by consuming either the essence or soul of the monsters they killed. Since Wayne could extract the essence, he could get new talents easily. As for the soul, it was an item drop. Unless the monster dropped it when it died, it was impossible to get it.
Wayne wanted to fix the blue python's body but decided not to because he knew that the hunter was keeping an eye on him. Even so, he had no problem with extracting the skills, cultivation technique, and essence out of the blue python.
The blue python Wayne killed had two skills, bite and coil. As for the tail smash it did many times during the fight, that was not a skill. That was simply the python's way of using its body. The python did try to bite Wayne but failed. As for coil, the python did not have a chance of using it because Wayne used the flowing water step to keep a safe distance from the python.
Wayne extracted the two skills and got two free skill books. He hid it with his body and immediately put it in his storage. After that, he extracted the cultivation technique. Unfortunately, the blue python only knew one cultivation technique, the blue python cultivation technique. Wayne assumed it got the technique since it was born.
"Maybe the stronger monsters might have more cultivation technique," thought Wayne. Even so, he was happy with what he found. All the skills and techniques were of low quality. Wayne did not mind it because he could create better ones with Precious Touch.
After that, Wayne extracted the essence and he got three essences. The snake essence, the blue python essence, and water essence. All of them were G grades. If Wayne wanted to get new talent, it was better to get a better grade as it would determine the grade of the talent.
"The water essence will be useful. This one is low grade but no problem, my special skill will settle the problem once I have more water essence," thought Wayne. He might have a focus on the water essence but he also intended to use the other two essences too.
Having more talent was not a problem. Either he cultivated it or not was the most important thing. Wayne had no intention to cultivate the snake and blue python talents but he did not mind getting the talents. Who knows? He might need them one day.
The life of a hunter and explorer was long. Many of the first-generation hunters and explorers are still alive to this day. For example, the Hunter Association's chairman. The old man was more than 500 years old but he was healthy and strong thanks to his identity as hunters or maybe the thanks should be directed to the system who let people lengthened their age.
Wayne put them all back to his storage and he started dissecting the blue python's body. He could sell the skin and bones of the python. The skin might not sell that much due to the damage from his jabs but they still had some value. The bones could also be sold as materials for equipment.
As for the meat, Wayne decided to keep it for eating. He would stay in the dungeon for 10 days and he needed food. The meat was nutritious and could increase the status of his body too. As someone who had just started his career as a hunter, he would need the meat to strengthen his body.
After that, he took out the monster's core which was the most valuable out of all the materials from the body excluding the item drops (skills, techniques, souls). The monster core was widely used as a source of energy.
The human had left all the primitive energy sources such as petroleum and used the monster core as an energy source because the core contained mana that could not be used to power up machines.
Wayne happily harvested anything he could get from the blue python until he remembered that his storage was small. "…"