Museum Core Chapter 34: The Cultivator’s Dive

Name: Jaclyn Abrams

Race: Human

Class: Anima Monk

F-Rank, Level 10 -> 16/20

Class Abilities

Spirit Bond: Honey Badger (F-Rank)

Statistics (0 points available)

Body: 40 -> 60

Magic: 0

Mind: 20 -> 40

Spirit: 19 -> 39

Skills

Pugilism 15 -> 18

Bàoquán 17 -> 19

Athletics 16 -> 17

Situational Awareness 19 -> 20

Bullshit Radar 12 -> 13

Martial Arts 18 -> 20

…

So, as crazy as it had been, she’d grown massively. It might even have been worth it to wind up face-first in Tatzelwyrm blood.

She’d blown through F-Rank, though while she’d been initially worried about going too far focusing on power and not enough on Skill, until she’d realized that most people would hit E-Rank after a year or so of work at most, and since they usually started somewhere between fifteen and twenty years of age … she was an old fart by comparison, with around twenty years spent gathering experience on normal people shooting through the ranks.

She’d wound up equally splitting the points of her six Levels between the three Stats she actually used.

This morning, Granger had regaled her with the information on how Stats actually functioned. She hadn’t asked him to, but she’d learned that while he had a ton of information locked away in his head, much of it without a real-world use, the stuff he chose to share was more likely than not to be useful.

So when she’d wound up wondering out loud how it was possible that her Body and Spirit attributes overlapped so much, she’d learned that what the System presented as “Stats”, was just a way of directing the energy gained by leveling up.

Spending “points” on Body improved her strength, speed, and durability, Mind boosted memory, reaction speed, and the speed of one’s thoughts, which also helped her get the most out of her raw physical speed, and finally, Spirit fed energy into her power, the Spirit Bond, which, in turn, empowered her body to resist toxins and physical strikes.

Initially, she’d really needed to focus on gaining the physical strength to do something, anything at all, to her enemies, but once she’d gained it, she’d really had to focus on shoring up her reflexes, and getting tougher would allow her to survive getting in close enough to land her punches. The boost to her senses of hearing and smell didn’t go amiss either.

She could already hear the tigers up on the mezzanine despite not even having reached the entrance hall.

As they passed by the door, she spotted the monkey the Dungeon spoke through sitting on the desk. Or at least, she thought it was the same one. It could easily have been another one, having taken the place of the first one. It was probably the former, but she had no real way to tell which was the case.

But the thing to take note of was that it had her gun lying on the desk before it.

“Thank you,” she said, reaching out and slipping it back into its holster. She thought about petting the monkey, but considering what she knew about these critters, she gave that situation even odds of getting bitten. And if Daedalus was directly controlling it, well, that might get taken the wrong way.

By then she crossed the threshold, everyone else was already out, and behind her, the heavy footsteps of that gigantic whip-tail began to thunder out.

That damn thing, the next time she faced it … yeah, next time, she’d not get thrown about the place. Maybe she could …

Her musings were interrupted by the shocking sight of the jungle writhing, trees swaying in a non-existent storm, vines shooting through the air like bullwhips, shrubbery growing like mad to form a carpet thick enough to walk upon. Not the ground underneath the shrubs, but atop the shrubs themselves.

And leading that procession of madness was a single young man, glowering in a way that would have had his own personal stormcloud hovering above him, had this been some manner of cartoon.

Oliver Fields, with one hand resting on the pommel of his sword, which was at his side this time, and the other holding some kind of compass. Considering that he was heading straight towards the Museum, that device was clearly leading him here.

Oh, this could not possibly be good.

“Move!” he snarled in their general direction, not even bothering to look their way, and they had already been out of his path.

The first time they’d met, he’d blocked the path of their convoy, nearly causing several accidents, and built himself up as this big bad cultivation god while secretly betraying his lack of real-world experience.

The second time, he was looking downright unhinged, a living force of fury ready to tear down anything in his path.

“So, you knew there was something here the whole time?” Fields growled as he passed, adding a muttered, “I’ll deal with you later” that Jaclyn heard perfectly clearly.

Perhaps it would have been a better idea to visit the “village” first, but honestly, this behavior was just proving her point about Fields being trouble.

And now, at least, they knew where that man was right now, in a location that wasn’t in the village, which should give them a chance to get a good look at the situation without the superpowered ball of teenage hormones hanging around.

She turned back towards the Dungeon and shouted “Good Luck” while locking eyes with one of the wyverns on the roof.

***

Oh, yeah, that cultivator, the one the inspector had warned him about.

He was E-Rank, as far as Thomas’ senses could detect, but at the upper end of it, holding some kind of major forest-based power, but without the clearly defined individual abilities held by his creatuers, or the likes of Inspector Abrams.

They kept lumping on more and more Qi with each stage they grew, which they could then use to reinforce their bodies and use techniques … except that the weakest of those techniques was meant to take months to learn, barring the use of some kind of artifact.

Just what had that guy found out there?

Thomas immediately began shifting his Dungeon’s defenses around, going from a staggered defense to something that repeatedly hit with as much force as he could concentrate in a given spot.

The cultivator marched into the entrance hall with his foliage boiling in from behind him … except that he’d already sent a few ahead of him and obliterated the one monkey that Thomas currently had near the entrance.

Of course, the cultivator was promptly crushed to the ground the instant he walked out from under the mezzanine when a hippo landed on him. That should be enough to hurt even him, shouldn’t it?

And by that point, the camarasaurus’ whip tail was already in motion, cracking through the air and aiming right at the head of the crushed cultivator, though the target was already pushing up both himself and the hippo on his back.

When the tail did impact, the young man’s head snapped to the side while the creature sitting on his back tried to bite him, but the foliage surged from the entrance, ripping through both the hippo and the camarasaurus in seconds.

And as soon as the weight on his back was largely gone, the cultivator began to march onwards, the foliage seeming to march along with him, tearing apart the remaining creatures on the mezzanine almost by accident before continuing to find the various snakes hidden around the place.

An impressive showing buuuuut …

“How long can he keep that up?” Thomas asked.

“Up until the corridor, maybe,” Elias said. “We don’t know how much Qi he wasted on that little display out in the Dungeon.

Thomas started shuffling his remaining avatar monkeys around to ensure that he’d be able to throw them at his “visitor” once they wouldn’t be instantly shredded.

And while that happened, he had his Boomslangs wither every piece of vegetation he’d put in his Dungeon to avoid it being used against him.

The cultivator marched into the next corridor with a confident smirk upon his face, vines already binding the giant sloth inside without ever giving it the chance to do anything but the woolly rhino he’d relocated to the opposite corridor charged into his back.

A horn the length of a human torso slammed into his back, pitching him off his feet, tearing his clothes, and making his spine bend in a way that looked painful but not in a way that would cause permanent damage. A skin-reinforcement technique?

Another vine flipped the young man into the air, and even as he tumbled around like a drunk acrobat, he unsheathed his sword, a line of energy running from it and bisecting the rhino.

“That’d be sword energy,” Elias told Thomas after he’d asked. “Not something he should have access to if he’s a local, unless he got his hands on some very rare and valuable resources.”

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

But just like Elias had predicted, that had been the last of the cultivator’s qi. Or, more pessimistically, the last qi he was willing to spend like water.

Holding his sword in a strange manner that had it sticking out to his side, at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, the cultivator advanced into the dino section. It looked cool but also seemed wildly impractical.

“Why are you attacking like that?” Thomas called out via one of his monkeys.

“You killed my brother!” the cultivator growled, looking even more furious.

“I’ve never killed a human!” Thomas shot back. He was ninety-nine percent certain that this was all about the Landwyrm, but if there was even a one percent chance that this was all a misunderstanding, he had to clear it up. After all, it wasn’t like he was losing anything trying.

“Yeah, keep acting like you don’t know!”

And that was that, Thomas supposed. Besides, he’d promised himself long ago that he wouldn’t hold back when he was in serious danger. Well, that had been only a few days ago, but the promise still stood.

The three dinosaurs in there charged straight at the cultivator, who began to grin ferally and shifted into a new stance.

That was when the snakes attacked. Thomas’ Fer de Lance pattern was still without a rank, sadly, but the Boomslangs had been extensively used and bumped up all the way to E-Rank.

Wherever they bit down, the full bite force of a hippopotamus was concentrated into those tiny serpent jaws, punching clean through even the heavily reinforced skin of the cultivator.

As far as he could tell, the man’s defensive technique increased external durability while boosting the flexibility of his body, as seen by what had happened when the rhino had hit him.

He also should have really improved the venom of the snakes with a power of some kind. Thinning the blood, making every wound bleed for a long time, turning even bruises into medical emergencies, those were impactful abilities, but how much would a single bite do to a powerful cultivator?

The next few snakes were less than a second behind the first one, but that delay was enough for every bit of foliage on their target’s clothing to explode to life, shoots of new growth sharpening and hardening to impale all the serpents.

But as a happy little side effect, covering oneself in tough foliage had a deleterious effect on mobility, so when the scolosaurus’ tail clubs hit the cultivator, he was barely able to dodge.

Ribs crunched, and a leg bent in a way a leg was never meant to bend, and then, the t-rex arrived.

The cultivator tried to stand, but with the way the presence of the tyrant king ruining his footing, he was too slow and found his way between the jaws of the massive lizard.

And then, once again, he exploded, sharpened stakes growing clean through the skull of the t-rex and catching the stegosauruses before they had the time to escape.

That would have to be the strategy of the day, forcing the invader to the brink where he’d have to blow through a ton of energy to escape.

Falling from the limp jaws of a creature only kept standing by the wood impaling it, the cultivator yanked something from a spatial ring. Some kind of healing device?

Either way, not something Thomas would allow.

Cheshire dug her claws into the floor of her room and pulled herself forward, sending herself sliding across the ground, ever-accelerating, until she leaped just before she was about to hit the not-so-smooth floor of the dino section, closing half the distance to the target before she touched the ground again. And then, finally, she activated her second power.

For a moment, it looked as though reality itself had been hit by a lag spike, her motion accelerating to the point where she practically seemed to be in two places at once, with the space connecting those two points being occupied by a Cheshire-colored smear, the afterimage of the terrifying predator’s motion.

A paw the size of a dinner plate, studded with claws like combat knives, smashed the cultivator’s treasure clean from his hand while the second laid open his gut, as though the cat were attempting to clean a freshly caught fish.

Another explosion of foliage forced Cheshire to open the distance again, forming into a brown-green fortress that allowed its occupant to take out and drink another mystery vial.

And as for the first vial, well, that had just been swallowed by a snake that had only just reached the scene of the battle and was currently fleeing with it, trying to get far enough away that the Dungeon could absorb it.

This time, the cultivator’s injuries were fixed, massive cuts closing over in moments, though the shredded clothes indicated just how badly Cheshire had hurt him.

Healing potion? How many did he have?

The giant sabertooth reared up on her hind legs and began to swipe at the air, claw projections cutting open the foliage with ease.

A line of white energy burst from the cultivator’s blade, nearly shearing Cheshire in half but she blurred to the side before launching herself at the young man.

His defense managed to hack off a front leg but the second swept his legs out from under him with enough speed and force to briefly leave him hanging in midair.

And that was when Cheshire’s jaws closed around his torso, massive twin fangs cleanly punching through him, then proceeded to shake her head vigorously, worrying his body with every other tooth scraping along his body and hopefully making it hard to concentrate.

Hopping on her three remaining legs, the sabertooth made her way to the boss room.

Unfortunately, by that point, it was proven just how dangerous it was to have a living foe in one’s jaws.

Be it due to an inability to focus while being shaken by the large cat or simply Qi depletion, the cultivator was forced to desperately swipe with his sword until he managed to hack clean through the cat’s throat, and … Cheshire just kept wildly shaking her head, making sure to have his skull bump against the walls and floor as many times as possible.

Redundant biology, the ability to absorb oxygen through the skin to locally make up for a lack of bloodflow, and more besides allowed Cheshire to survive quite a bit more than a regular big cat, but even they didn’t make her immortal.

Now it was just a question of who died first, her or that asshat invader.

By the time the sabertooth died and disappeared in the way Dungeon creatures were wont to do, her prey looked like a particularly sadistic dog’s chewtoy.

A ring on his left ring finger began to glow, flaring to life before breaking with a loud “crack”, and the cultivator stirred. The injuries were still there, wounds that would kill almost anyone else, but somehow, he was still able to move.

Of course, the Landwyrm in the next room over had already spat acid the instant Cheshire died and it splattered across the cultivator before he could do anything else.

He jumped in shock, and shook himself, frantically wiping at his face in the manner of someone who’d just had a pail of water dumped on them, rather than a person who was currently dissolving alive in acid.

What the fuck had that ring done?.

The Landwyrm charged but countless more resources flowed from the cultivator’s storage ring, which he was currently holding above his open mouth, pouring straight down his gullet.

Acid dried and flaked off, flesh reknit itself where immense teeth had torn ragged gashes, chemical burns vanished and his body reconstituted itself from nothing.

Ok, what the actual fuck did that guy find out there?

Another blast of acid flew at his face, but this time, he dodged. Did that mean he didn’t have enough stuff left to completely fix himself, or was he just trying to avoid more pain?

A blast of sword energy bisected the Landwyrm and that would have been it … if Dexter hadn’t chosen that moment to arrive.

The giant sloth had had the devil’s time getting out of the final room, even with a ludicrously flexible body and limbs that were functionally made from rubber.

Note to self, figure out a way for him to get outside in a timely manner.

“Oh … shit.”

Hearing the defeat in the cultivator’s voice was insanely gratifying, but sadly, it was immediately followed up by another blast of foliage. Likely, the final one, as this one was a hell of a lot weaker, creating only a thorned barrier between them.

And then, Dexter’s wrecking ball of a fist smashed straight through and hurled the cultivator away like a baseball.

It was a beautiful punch, really. A humanlike joint system that allowed the giant sloth to draw its arm back like a human, then throw his entire body behind the attack and sending his target flying in an almost comical fashion.

But his arm continued to travel forward, smashing into the wall beside the cultivator, and then, grabbed ahold of the little jackass.

Reeling his right hand back in Dexter threw back his left hand, and unleashed another powerful blow at the crushed cultivator.

A sword slash across the palm allowed the young man to free himself from the sloth’s grasp and he collapsed to the ground bonelessly, but not dead.

An emerald green glow began to emanate from somewhere around his hands and he pushed himself to his feet, one arm now visibly broken, but an emerald gateway opened up in front of him.

Dexter tried to pull him back out, but his hands just went right through, as though the cultivator weren’t even there.

As both the sloth and Thomas stared, the broken arm twisted and repaired itself.

Throwing them a middle-finger, the cultivator staggered out to the other end of what seemed to be a portal … only for his posture to go from “relieved” to “furious” in an instant.

Oh, were things not going well where that artifact had spat him out? Poor baby …

Having that little asshole come storming in and shredding most of his defenses had sucked, but that, that put a smile on Thomas’ metaphorical face.

And by the time that jackass returned, he’d find the Dungeon’s defenses adjusted to fuck with him specifically.