The Sins
Page 26
When he was all done, he had a few seeds left over. With an idea in mind, John walked towards the entrance of the cave and flew up a few feet. It was there that he created another drill below him and dug down about a hundred miles. When he was deep enough, he dug out a small cave and created another experimental garden. Three of the leftover seeds found their home there—one of each herb. If they survived and gained more Life Power, he would move the rest of his farm down there.
He dug down for thousands of miles which took a few days to do. He kept hollowing out little caves and planting deeper and deeper into the planet. He eventually ran out of seeds only a few hundred miles away from the outer core where the metal liquid was.
John reckoned if he dug a hole to the metal liquid without closing the gap, the metal liquid could travel up the hole and maybe reach the surface. He wasn’t looking to destroy any other planets currently, so he avoided digging there altogether.
He did, however, teleport the few hundred miles to the metal liquid. All of the skin and clothing of the people he’d killed were deposited and destroyed. The skins belonging to his Rank 8 or 9 victims took much longer to disappear, something he noted with an unexpected knot in his stomach.
Almost a month later, John was playing pool when he heard his system ringing.
Welcome to the Idle System 6.9.
Name: John
Title: Demon
Age: 41
Idlers: 0/616
Skill Points: 5
Life Pool: 2
Toxin Pool: 200B
Sin: 51
Time Pool: 17y 6m 7d 3h 36m 56s
Immortality List:
Strengthening Branches - Idlers 0/617, Indestructible - 0/9
Misc List:
Maximum Idlers - Idlers 616/617, +1 Max Idlers - 617/2159, Time - 16d 18h 24m 42s
Maximum Workers - Idlers 0/617, +1 Idler Workers - 518/2061
*SPECIAL* Sleep Mode - Idlers 0/617, Cultivation 0/1
Share Slots - Idlers 0/617, Unlimited 0/1
Blood - Idlers 0/617, Attachment 0/1
Element - Idlers 0/617, Wind 0/1
Electric Signal - Idlers 0/617, Reboot 0/1
John noticed the *SPECIAL* skill right away but decided to come back to it. When his eyes came across the Electric Signal skill, his heart skipped more than one beat. He opened it up as quick as possible; the five seconds required to open the information panel felt like years.
Electric Signal:
Reboot: Any damage to the electric signals in the brain will reboot back to normal function after 60 seconds.
John stood there, shocked. The next thing he knew, he was jumping about screaming, cheering, and thanking the system.
After a minute, he had calmed down and used his Time Pool on the Maximum Idlers to finished the skill, but as he was about to place all 617 Idlers into Electric Signal, he had a thought.
The skill levels are from Rank 5 and before the reset, meaning if I place those Idlers back into Maximum Idlers, it should level a lot since it should have reset. If I place them into Electric Signal now, I could use more years in the Time Pool to complete the skill. Did the system try to trick me in wasting my Time Pool?
Calming down, he turned the Continue option on and placed the Idlers back into Maximum Workers. Like he’d predicted, the skill had reset. The system had tried to get him to waste his Time Pool.
After 460 levels, the time increased from one second to two seconds, then doubled for each level. John did the same tactic as before and turned the Continue option off when the time needed went over ten minutes. He did the same thing for Maximum Idlers. After 460 levels, that, too, increased in the amount of time needed. It was double the amount he got from Rank 5, and quadruple the amount from Rank 4.
He finally used the Time Pool to get the skill levels in both Maximum Worker and Maximum Idlers to a point it would take over a month to complete. 482 levels for both skills total.
Maximum Idlers - Idlers 0/1099, +1 Max Idlers - 1099/2159
Maximum Workers - Idlers 0/1099, +1 Idler Workers - 1000/2061
John placed all 1099 Idlers into the Electric Signal skill and the time came up as 6mo.
6 months! That would have been 10,990 years!
After coming out of his shock, he walked into Sarah’s cultivation room and sat down. Eyes planted on his sleeping wife, he used his Time Pool to complete the skill.
He placed all Idlers into Share Slots’ Unlimited skill and completed it with Time Pool again. Opening the fifth tab, under Sarah’s name was 25/∞. Finally, he shared the Electric Signals skill, confirmed it, and closed the system.
In his head, he counted down the time.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1!
Chapter 54
Almost Four Years
John stared deeply at Sarah’s eyelids.
When the countdown ended, they began to twitch again.
Is this a sign that she’s waking up?
John moved his hand to hold hers. He stroked her hand with his thumb, unable to peel his eyes away from her face.
Sarah’s eyes stopped twitching.
“Nnn…”
She slowly opened them.
John swallowed his enthusiasm. He wanted to jump for joy, to burst into tears, to hold her close. But he remembered what Luke said about deficits. What if she couldn’t remember him? What if she couldn’t remember her own name? Unable to speak? Fear choked him; he dug deep to speak.
“Sarah?” His voice was a hoarse whisper.
Sarah had a confused look on her face as she stared up from her bed. Hearing John’s familiar voice, she turned to him. A warm smile crossed her face.
“Morning,” she said sweetly. She was in a bit of a daze, but it just made it seem like she’d just woken up from a brief nap.
Unable to speak, John leaned forward and gave her a kiss. He placed his head next to hers and held her close. Sarah lifted her arms for the first time in years, wrapping them around him. They stayed like this for over five minutes as John refused to let go.
“What happened?” Sarah’s voice was muffled, her face still pressed to John’s shoulder.
“Well…” John pulled away slightly, still holding her. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“The last thing I remember…” She had to think hard for a few seconds. “I went in for the kill on Chris, but then everything went dark. Next thing I know, I’m here with you.”
“You got struck by lightning,” John replied.
“He could use lightning?” Sarah pulled away even more, now at arm’s length away from her husband. “I didn’t know. And what happened to your right eye? The colour is all…”
“Ah.” He smiled. “After you got hit by lighting, I went on what I would call a mini-rampage. When it was all over, this marking and the black eye formed.”
John let go of Sarah completely and sat back down on the chair next to her bed. Sarah noticed he had tears in his eyes so she lifted her left hand, tracing it along John’s cheek until she wiped away a tear. However, as soon as she did that, the black eye and yellow pupil began to fade. She drew her hand back, confusing John. She quickly told him what was happening.
Taking out a small mirror, John could see his eye had now turned back to normal. The black seven-sided star pattern remained, but the eyeball itself bore no strange colours.
“Do you remember what I told you years ago inside this cave about Dao Companions?” John cracked a smile as he examined the eye. “I also said you would be the anchor to keep me sane and that if something ever happened to you, I would go around destroying this universe. You remember that?”
Sarah nodded, a strange smile on her face.
“Well, when you got hit by lightning and you went into a coma, my mini-rampage resulted to that.” He grinned, showing his teeth. “You coming back has made me sane again!”
“Wait, a coma?” Sarah knitted her brows. “How long was I out for? And how did I survive without an IV drip or a ventilator attached?”
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Sarah tried sitting up more, but her muscles were stiff from lack of use. John helped her sit up on the bed and explained everything that had happened.
After John had finished explaining, his wife had mixed emotions. To go so far for her sake made her feel loved, but to kill so many people for her sake made her feel a little guilty.
“That Chris Han is now my fighter puppet since that was a good punishment for him.” John then pointed behind him using his thumb. “If you don’t like the face, I can change it.”
“It is a good punishment for him, but you better change it.” Sarah clenched her jaw, a fire lighting in her eyes. “Or else every time I see his face, I’ll decapitate him!”
John laughed. He made yet another nano helmet and placed it on Chris. He pushed Toxin Power into it and changed his features. While he had the nano metal out, he made another long and short sword for himself. They were replicas of the ones he had used, but he had no runes on him.
Sarah stood up but her leg muscles were shaking. She leaned on the chair and stretched her legs. She saw her helmet on the table next to the bed and saw a note underneath.
John turned around and found her staring at the note, walked over, and picked it up.
“This is to explain that Chris is my fighter puppet in case you woke up and I wasn’t here.” He put the note in his Storage Space.
Don’t want her to read the other side now.
As Sarah continued to stretch her body, John checked the new skills in the system.
*SPECIAL* Sleep Mode:
Cultivation: Gives you the option to sleep while cultivating. There are 5 programmable alarms to wake you up, and 1 programmable cultivation technique to use while sleeping.
WARNING - As long as any of the 5 alarms haven’t gone off, it is impossible to wake up. If something goes wrong with the cultivation technique and an alarm does not go off, then it could cause serious injuries depending on how long you sleep for while cultivating.
Blood:
Attachment: If a body part gets separated for any reason, the blood inside the body will reattach the body part and scab over the ends of both parts long enough for the skin, muscle, tendons, and bone to reattach. The scab will automatically disappear afterwards. If the separated body part gets destroyed for any reason, the blood in the body will generate a new part, already attached.
Element:
Wind: Gain the ability to use the wind element.
Sleep mode, that’s brilliant! To reach Rank 7, I need to enter a closed-door cultivation session to speed up the process by about 8 to 10 years, but while Sarah was in a coma, I wouldn’t risk leaving her. The Blood’s Attachment is a good skill, too. The system listened after I tried testing the Combine skill but got worried about losing a finger.
And then there’s the Element’s Wind. With the wind element, the Combine skill should become much more useful. The special skill counts as 0.5 while the other 4 skills count as 0.1, so a special skill is 1 above a unique skill. Are there other skills that count as 0.6, 0.7 or even 0.9?
He placed his Idlers in each skill before using the Time Pool to finish them off. Each of the three skills came up as 6mo for a year and six months total. Then he turned the Continue option on and placed all Idlers into the Strengthening Branches Indestructible skill.
‘Ding!’
Tooltip - You will not gain a level until you have the required Life Power. For the first level, 2 trillion Life Power is required.
The time came up as 1mo. John noticed that with the Immortality List’s skills, all started around a month as long as he levelled the Maximum Idlers and Maximum Workers up first. One month with the number of Idlers he had, the original time would have been 1,831 years and 8 months.
Closing the system, he saw that Sarah was finishing her stretching. She turned her head to speak to him.
“You avoided the question earlier,” she said with a frown. “How long was I in a coma for? You explained how I survived and what you had to do, but you didn’t answer this question. Do you think I will regret the fight? Think I’ve wasted time and become depressed?”
“No, that’s not it.” John sighed. “It’s just… You’ve been in a coma for almost four years.”
Sarah’s expression didn’t change.
“For cultivators above Rank 6, that’s like a short nap.” She shrugged. “It isn’t as bad as I thought it was. I’m still able to reach Rank 4 soon and when we both hit Rank 9, we can spend an eternity together.”
“Oh yeah?” John smiled. His wife’s optimism was well welcomed. “You’ve now got a Rank 9 bodyguard. Chris is useless to me now. Most Rank 9 fighters, I can defeat on my own. Only the rare geniuses or battle-hardened Rank 9’s could kill me now.”
The two shared a happy chuckle.
“Anyway, I recently got a skill that allows me to share all my skills with you!” John bore a toothy grin. “I doubt you want to go back to sleep again, but do you want the skills?”
“Of course!” Sarah shook her head. “I want them, but I feel guilty. You’re able to give me all these skills and I’m only giving you seven in return. Four of them aren’t even from my Toxic System.”
John laughed.
“You remember Lexis, right? A power user but has almost no speed? We can say that’s your system, too. It needs help to get to the top, but once at the top, it is much stronger than anything else.” The husband placed an encouraging hand on his wife’s shoulder. “My system is more about gaining immunity to everything so I can stand around and be idle while people attack. Your system generates Toxin Power that’s five times stronger than Life Power. If I wasn’t using Toxin Power, do you think I could have killed anyone above Rank 6 when I was just a Rank 3 or 4?”
Sarah’s frown turned into a small smile, and John kept at it.
“In the prison, it was thanks to your Toxin Power conversion skill that I could even escape!” John’s face was alight with enthusiasm. “Plus, when we reach Rank 7, others will need 10 trillion Life Power units while we can make up for the difference in Toxin Power! Then, they’re done, they’ve reached the summit of how much they can store, but for us, there’s still more to go as we can get five times more Life Power stored because of the Toxin Power.”
The couple drew closer together. John wrapped Sarah in his arms and continued.
“When we reach the top, your system will show its true colours and let us become invincible in this universe,” he cooed gently in her ear. “There is no need to feel guilty. Without you, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”
Chapter 55
Sleep Mode
“Anyway, I’ll go ahead and share all my skills with you.” John smiled down at Sarah, letting go of her torso so she could turn and look him in the eye. “It will take a while. I’ll warn you before I push the confirm button so you can prepare yourself.”
Sarah nodded in approval, so he opened the system up. He went into the fifth tab and under Sarah’s name, he placed almost all of his skills into the slot. He only left out the ones that wouldn’t become useful to her, such as the ones that only pertained to his Idle System.
Palm Toughness, Knuckle Damage, Elbow Damage, Knee Damage, Feet Damage, Elbow Joints, Knee Joints, Shoulder Joints, Ankle Joints, Dismantler, Taste Option, Dynamic Vision, Absorption Speed, Absorb Option, Sin, Force, Force II, Threads, Threads II, Memory Manipulation, Atom Defence, Creation, Sleep Mode, Blood, and Element Wind.
“Alright.” John looked at Sarah. “I’m gonna hit the confirm button now.”
With the skills that were already shared with her, there were fifty-one skills total that John now shared with Sarah. What surprised John was that Sarah did not scream in the process. He knew she was in severe pain, but somehow she held herself well.
It took two hours for all the skills to be transferred. Afterwards, they both did many tests to see what helped. Sarah could see sins with the Immortal Eye skill, and could even collect sins herself thanks to the Sin skill. That confused John a little.
After all the tests, Sarah got used to her new skills and looked at John with her Immortal Eye. Her jaw dropped and she exclaimed.
“You’re Rank 6 already?! You’ve gained three ranks in four years! I’m not even a Rank 4!”
“Hey, that’s partially your fault!” John could only laugh. “I went to destroy the Anti-Assassin Sect’s planet out of revenge. Now that you’ve got all those skills and can use sins, you can go destroy a planet, too, if you want.”
“That will be my last resort,” Sarah replied with curled lips. “I’m so close to reaching Rank 4 now, and all those skills should make it easier for me to catch up. I also want to open a medical practice on the Sword Sect’s planet. Huh? What’s with that expression?”
John shook his head with a shaky grin plastered on his face. He rubbed the back of his head as Sarah peered closer at his face.
“Err… I think Fred and Frank are still angry at me,” he answered nervously. “After you went into a coma, I demanded the Anti-Assassin spies inside the sect to come forward. We came to a deal to kill the person who sold us out to convince the rest to spill everything they knew, but I put the rest of the spies in a locked-in patient syndrome. No one knew how I did it, but still…”
Sarah opened her mouth in surprise and John immediately tried defending himself.
“I didn’t break the deal!” He raised his hands as if to defend against a blow to the face. “They were still alive, technically! I had already left before the poison did its job, so they couldn’t prove it was me!”
“Jesus, John…” Sarah shook her head. “Well, let’s forget all that for now. Let’s go home.”
John smiled, turned around, and gave the cook puppet and his fighter puppet new orders before he brought them home. The fighter puppet was to protect Sarah and listen to all her orders. The cook’s order was to only cook dinner when guests came over since he and Sarah no longer needed to eat to survive. It wasn’t long before the whole group was settled in at their home on the Sword Sect planet for the first time in years.