After requesting for the resources to upgrade the shrine and giving my argument as to why, the Sect Master had to sit there for a while and think about his response.
A few seconds later I heard him sigh as he said, "I can give you the resources for that, but I will need to go get them first."
With that he got up and was about to leave when I called out for him to stop.
Turning around, he looked at me with a questioning gaze and asked, "Don't you want me to grab you the resources?"
Hanging my head at this, I sighed and asked, "Do you know what resources I need without me telling you?"
He went still when I said this for about half a second before asking what I needed to upgrade the shrine. This was not much of an issue, and as the upgrade only took four types of resources, it was easy to remember. However I only told him about three of them as the concrete needed to be made by me.
The only hard part came when he asked me how much one unit of wood was considered. This led me to take out a piece from my inventory to show him.
When he saw the size of one unit and remembered that I had asked him for seventy of such units, he quickly said, "I am not sure that I will be able to get you the wood as fast as you would like the others; however, would not be much of a problem."
I could not help but smile at this and think of what it would be like to start upgrading the shrines, as they would be the first thing I would upgrade that I did not design myself or was part of the crafting system.
It was then that I remembered something special about the upgrade system and said to the sect master before he left, "By the way, the better the grade of the materials used now, the less the cost of the upgrades will be in the future."
He had a small hitch in his step when I said this but carried on nonetheless and said with his back still facing both my mom and me, "I will see what I can do."
With that he left the gardens and then flew in the air toward the main mountain of the sect.
Now that he had left, I remembered what I had initially pulled into the garage for when I found Mom and The Sect Master having an argument. Turning to her, I asked, "By the way, Mom, I wanted to ask why, when the motorcycle went completely parallel to the ground that, I did not fall off?"
She looked completely caught off guard by this question but soon cleared her through and answered, "That would have to do with some of the engravings I put on the bike for its hard space drive mode. While that mode is active you will not be able to fall off the bike if you did not want to or if something did not force you to."
As she finished saying this, I could feel my tail wagging around excitedly while I clasped my hands together and asked, "And how fast is my motorcycle compared to other flying tools?"
After I asked this, Mom got a thoughtful look on her face before thinking out loud, saying, "Well, since your bike only needs to create a hard space surface for it to drive on, it is fairly efficient on power usage for that. Because of this all the speed comes from the natural speed of the bike. Then, with it generating its own thrust through a highly efficient engine it can go faster than normal flying tools of its grade.
"So I would say that it is about fifty to seventy-five percent faster than a normal flying tool in its category."
I was so excited after hearing this that I could not stop myself from jumping up and down, saying, "Good luck, ambushers!"
This elicited a chuckle from Mom, who was watching all of this before calming me down by saying, "Now it's time to begin your training for the outer sect competition."
I now wanted to run away once she said that, but before I could even move, I was grabbed by the shoulder and led into the courtyard of the house under guard.
Thankfully, the training session did not change much, and the only difference was that instead of being able to hold my ground slightly, I was now getting beaten into the ground again.
From here I was let off to do anything that I wanted without any oversight, so I went out to the shrine to start cultivating. This was more because I wanted to fill the primary task of the second Quest first.
The other two quests would come in time, and I would not be able to do anything about them right now.
My cultivation then lasted until dinner when Mom came out to get me. After that, it was back to cultivating at the shrine until dawn.
When dawn arrived, I cultivated through it before heading back to the house and having breakfast.
After breakfast came training again, where I got beaten black and blue again, but this time, unlike the previous times, I got a notification saying that my swordsmanship had reached level 90.
This made me want to celebrate; however, I still needed to complete some tasks for the upcoming competition, so I wanted to go out and continue cultivating instead.
Surprisingly, though, Mom would not let me go to the shrine and continue to cultivate but, on the other hand, dragged me to the library and had me sit down at the desk as she set a blank note book in front of me.
She then pulled out a blackboard from her spatial storage device and placed it in front of the desk.
With both of these things finished I watched as she took a piece of chalk and wrote at the top of the board world history.
She then waved her hand, and a book from one of the shelves flew over and landed on the desk right next to me.
By this point, I would have to be a moron not to understand what was happening, and this was both something I wanted and did not at the same time.
It was not because I hated school but more because I did not want to have to relieve some of the things that I did during that time back then.
Either way, I was going to have to sit through this one way or the other, so I decided to be obedient and do as I was instructed, whether silently or otherwise.
Eventually, I made my way through this lesson, and it was time for dinner.
Walking back to the house both Mom and I sat down for dinner as Yuki brought it out. It was nothing special this time, so I remained calm and ate dinner before heading out to the shrine to cultivate once more.
From here same sequence of events played out with only the contents of each event being slightly different.
Then came the dawn of the next day when I was about to finish my cultivation I felt like my core had reached its maximum capacity.
With no time like the present, I initiated the core upgrade process and felt as each core consumed the energy that was in them to upgrade themselves.
Having four cores instead of the normal three would most likely confuse things for the normal person. Especially when you consider that the normal person only has one core active instead of all three, making things more difficult than normal.
The problem I was encountering, though, was that I already knew what each of the original three cores was supposed to do, but I had no idea about my fourth core. So, as this upgrade process advanced, I paid attention to the way the energy in it reacted compared to the other cores.
What I found was that the energy in this fourth core seemed to be reacting and manipulating the energy in my tail in a weird way. I would occasionally see phantom connections appearing in its meridian network, as well as an open space in the middle.
It seemed like this open space was meant to hold something, and the connections were meant to go somewhere, but both of them were too unstable to actually be created at the moment.
I wanted to figure out what was going on and dive deeper into this, but as soon as I got that ambition, the upgrade ended, and a large wave of air was released from the surface of my body.
Opening my eyes, I looked behind me to see Mom standing there, slightly shocked, with her mouth hanging open.
When she saw me looking at her she then asked, "What stage have you reached?"
Smiling a little as I knew this would get to her, I answered, "The fifth stage."
And as I guessed, her expression was absolutely delightful.