Ning flew through the city with buildings that seem to touch the sky. They were so tall that they made the buildings back on earth look dwarfed.
The city was built on top of a massive spirit vine that seemed to last for millenniums on end, so most people traveled to stay on this land. Soon, people started building high rising buildings to accommodate the increasing population.
Since the population was so high, it was impossible for everyone to walk on the roads, so flight rules were pretty lax. Depending on your level of cultivation, you got to fly at a certain height.
With his Peak Golden Core Cultivation, Ning got to fly at just below the 1 Kilometer height. He rushed back to the area where he was taking residence and went into his room.
Once inside, he finally decided to check what was different now that the system AI had gone silent. He sat on his bed and started with the most simple command.
'Status,'
A panel appeared in both his vision and his mind. "Oh, so this works. Good," he said and looked at the status page in front of him.
[Status
Name: Ning Ruogong
Energy: 152.48 Trillion
Separated Energy-
Heat Energy: 920 Billion
Sound Energy: 22 Billion
Qi Energy: 151.32 Trillion
Kinetic Energy: 218 Billion
Aether Energy: 0
Skill: …]
Ning smiled when he saw this; he was more than 10% of the way there. "Alright, let's check the other things now," he thought and decided to check the Skill buying system next. That was what he really needed to care about.
"The system said there was an interface for me to work with right?" he thought. "Uh… open interface?"
A blue screen suddenly popped up once again giving him another surprise. He looked at the screen and thought, "That's it?". The screen was so simple that Ning started to wonder if he even got a correct one. However, the content on the screen did lead him to believe that it was the right one.
The screen that appeared in front of him had 3 big boxes that had a word written in each.
The first box said Objects, the second box said Skills, and the final one said Knowledge.
"Open Objects," Ning said and waited. He waited for more than a few seconds but nothing happened. "Huh? Open Objects!" he said once more, but once again nothing happened.
"Does voice commands not work here?" he started wondering. So, he reached out with his hands and tapped on the box named Object.
Finally, the screen changed and something else appeared. The new screen was all but empty. There was a single thing at the middle of the screen that was otherwise devoid of any content.
Ning looked at the white stripe in the middle of the screen and touched it. Suddenly, a blinking black line appeared on the left side of the white strip.
"Oh," Ning said as he realized what it was. It had been so many years, nearly half a millennium since he saw a text box. Until now, he had all but forgotten this thing even existed.
"That's very nostalgic," he said with a melancholic smile on his face. "So… is a keyboard going to appear for me to type in or do I use my voice?"
Since he didn't see any keyboard appear, he decided to use his speech. "Hmm… objects right, let's search for a spear. It's not like I'm going to buy it anyway," he thought.
So, he spoke onto the text box, "Spears."
The word 'Spears' appeared inside the white strip and another small box with a small icon that represented a magnifying glass appeared.
'Isn't that the search button? Is this how all systems work or is this one looking through my memories and adapting itself to the way things were back on earth?' Ning wondered.
He had never given any thought to why the system appeared the way it did, but now that he saw more of it, he started wondering that the system might have just adapted itself to seem as close to home as possible.
Popping up as screens, getting notifications, text boxes, search buttons— while all of these might not necessarily have been adapted to suit him the best, he was sure that some part of the system did so.
To begin with, the system spoke in a language that he was familiar with, so it went without question that there was some adapting that the system had to do with the host.
"Anyway, let's look through this stuff," he said and pressed the search button. In the blink of an eye, his screens were filled with things that overwhelmed him.
Every single nook and corner of the screen had something in it and Ning had a hard time realizing where it was he had to look.
"Urghh… So many texts," he thought. He took a deep breath to calm himself and checked the screen once more.
The topmost part of the screen had 2 parts to it, of which only one part seemed to be in use right now. The first one said Explore, and the second one said Create.
Since the page was on Explore, he looked through it. The very first thing below the Explore part was a massive list of filters that seemed to be custom made for Spears as it had stuff like 'Blade Material', 'Shaft Material', 'Spear Tail', 'Spear Tail Material', 'Blade length', 'Shaft Length', etc.
Ning ignored that for a moment and looked below it. There were numerous pictures of spears that when he started to scroll it went on forever.
After scrolling for a while, he got bored. There were a lot of different types of spears as the filters were on default. He clicked on a random spear and it popped up.
Ning was beyond shocked at the number of descriptions the spear held. Not only that, they were even adjustable, and with each adjust, the price of the spear increased or decreased.
'Damn, when the system was here, I didn't have to worry about any of this. I could just ask it to make something for me and it would. Now I have to go through all of this?' he sighed as he thought.
There was an arrow on the top left of the screen that took him back to the same page as before. Once he was there, he went to the Create section of the page.
As expected, he had to set a ton of filters accurately to get the spear that he wanted. Each thing he changed showed exactly how much energy it took, so he had a much better understanding of where his energy went.
He fiddled around with the system a little while before he backed out and back to the previous page with the text field. He searched a few different things and understood a little more about it.
He then backed up a few pages and went to check the Knowledge page. Similar to the objects page, this page had a text box too where he spoke something to search.
He decided to look up further information on Dark Emperor Eagles that Night had evolved into. The page that showed up after he hit the search button wasn't as hard to navigate as the Objects page.
There weren't options to choose from below, but there were filters to specify the content as small as possible. For example, if he wanted to see if Dark Emperor Eagles preferred the summer or the winter, he would have to tinker with a lot of knowledge filters to get specific enough to only find answers for that.
When Ning realized how hard it was going to be to search for the simplest of answers, he was horrified. He was horrified at the thought of spending minutes if not hours fine-tuning the knowledge preset until he got what he wanted.
If he needed to do that in the middle of the battle, that would be very hard. "Urgh… I miss the system answering my questions even more," he thought.
Finally, he checked the skills. The skills didn't have a search box, but instead had tags that one could choose from to get what he wanted.
He was surprised when he saw quite a few options were grayed out, without the name even being visible. 'Why would they do that? What if I want to use them?' he thought, but quickly realized that these were just skills that used a different sets of energies, and he hadn't unlocked them yet. So there was no point in getting the skills yet.
He decided to search for some skills. He chose 'Sword', 'Mid distance', 'Qi', and 'attack', and then hit search. A multitude of skills appeared that were all focused around using a sword that was powered through Qi and could attack and a little further away from him.
Similar to the Objects page, he could scroll endlessly. He also visited a Create page where he could set similar tags, and the system would create a skill for you.
Once he was done learning through all of these, he finally stopped and sighed. He felt like it took a lot out of him to just learn those things.
"I… am starting to regret sending the system away. Now I will have to find a place where I can stay lowkey and won't have to come in contact with others to fight. Dammit, the system didn't even tell me how long it was going to go," he worried.
He was relatively new to the immortal business, but he knew that he would have to live for so long that at some point, years would feel like seconds.
So, to a system that dealt with such beings and was used to them being okay with slumbering for eons upon eons, he was scared that the system would not return in time.
"Urghh… I should learn this interface a little more," he thought and kept checking. He spent a few days relaxing and checking up on the interface from time to time.
He wasn't relaxing for no reason, however; he had already stopped taking in Qi during his cultivation so he was preparing. Preparing for a breakthrough in realms.
The last time he went from the Foundation Establishment realm to the Golden Core Realm, the Sea of Qi in his naval area changed its content liquid to a solid gold ball that was extremely condensed. It was once more just a tenth of the total volume of the Sea of Qi.
Over the years, the Golden Core had slowly changed and grew larger and larger as he cultivated, and now it was large enough that it was fully touching his Sea of Qi from end to end.
At this point, he had stopped being able to gather any more Qi and would now need to break through to the higher realm.
"Sigh, I took as long as I did since I didn't want to rush it, and yet I still reached here so fast. It was a good thing I didn't buy the auto Qi absorption technique; if I did I would have had to break through to the Nascent Soul realm many decades ago and wouldn't be able to fully mingle with the folks who would be nothing but afraid of me," he thought.
"Alright, time to break through," he thought. "But before that, I need to leave this place. There are too many people in this city, so the chances of them trying to mess with my breakthrough is kind of high. I need to search of some good place," he thought.
He started looking through the map and searched for places he knew there weren't many people there. However, it also had to be a place with high Qi in the surrounding so that his breakthrough would be without disruption.
"Hm… that place seems fine," he thought as he looked through the map in his head and teleported.