“Wait a goddamn minute…” Arthur could not help but mutter, his attention fully focused on the small pile of gray dust above where his body was. “Isn’t that… the Inferior Spirit Slag I just made?”

“Sisa… care to explain?” he said soon after. In response, Sisa gave off the feeling that she shrugged her shoulders as she replied, “Well… in the first place, where did you expect it to go?”

“Uh…” As Arthur thought about any other place where the Inferior Spirit Slag might end up appearing, he could not help but think that Sisa did have a point. “On second thought, never mind.”

“Then again, I’m still quite curious as to why it appeared there,” he said, to which Sisa decided to explain. “Well, here’s the thing. Since you’re just a Spirit Seed, the range as to where your uh… ’produce’ shall appear is not really that far. At most, you could make it appear at least a couple of meters away from where your body is currently located, and that’s already pushing it.”

“But as you continue to enhance your main stats, this range will gradually expand, eventually allowing you to make the results of conversion appear wherever you want. Heck, if you wanted to fill a house with energized manure just because you wanted to, then you could do it… but not at your current level,” she added.

“In short, you’re telling me that this is how spirit veins normally operate, but because I have a system, it’s slightly more convoluted than usual,” Arthur said, filtering out all of the nonsense Sisa told him. However, the thought of filling a house with spirit shit was something he would definitely save for the future.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it,” Sisa told him.

After that, Arthur focused his attention once more on the things that he could through [Spirit Sense]. Of course, as the field would last for quite some time, he experimented a bit with it to see its limits, quickly finding out that he would be able to focus his attention on anything within the field’s range to obtain greater clarity and detail over that something. Then again, this was something the human eyes usually did. With that in mind, he could not help but think of [Spirit Sense] as some sort of third person human eye if he were to focus on that aspect of the skill.

Naturally, he also thought that he would only be able to see within the field given to him by the skill. However, once he had activated it, he found out that anything beyond the field’s range just turned more and more blurry the farther they were, just like the human eyes. From what he could deduce, he could see up to 2 kilometers away at the skill’s current level, which meant that he could see 10 times as far as his field’s range if he did not mind the finer details of the things he was looking at. Wondering if that would stay the same if he upgraded [Spirit Sense] or upgraded his Qi Purity, he placed the question at the back of his head for now.

Eventually, the field conjured by [Spirit Sense] disappeared as its duration was up, returning Arthur back to a world of darkness… if he were to ignore the cube and Sisa, that is. In any case, he was already quite satisfied with the fact that he had the ability to see again.

“So, how was it?” Sisa asked, to which he replied, “It feels like I’ve gotten something back that was taken away from me. Literally and figuratively.”

“I guess that’s to be expected,” replied Sisa, giving off the feeling that she was nodding in agreement. “After all, you were a human in your previous life. To have one of your basic senses given back to you is definitely a life changer, especially as an inanimate object.”

“Unfortunately, I still can’t use it that much,” Arthur said in response. “After all, I would still need to use the qi I have to form Inferior Spirit Slag, which I would then exchange for System Points. With that in mind, I should probably focus on improving my yields first before thinking about using [Spirit Sense] 24/7.”

And so, with a sense of relief washing over him now that he had regained the ability to look at the outside world, Arthur went ahead and activated [Qi Conversion] with renewed vigor, aiming to earn more System Points to spend.

With that, he went ahead and activated the skill a total of 10 more times, giving him a yield of 400 grams of Inferior Spirit Slag that piled up in front of the now slightly bluish white cube. Looking at the amount of fine gray dust he had created during the past 10 hours, he commanded the system to convert them into System Points, quickly obtaining four of them in exchange.

“Hmm… where should I allocate these points?” Arthur muttered to himself, eventually deciding to ask Sisa the same question as he thought she would be able to give some good advice. Fortunately, Sisa did not disappoint, telling him, “At the moment, you only have two choices. Those two choices would be increasing your Qi Capacity or upgrading your [Qi Conversion] skill.”

“Eh? Wouldn’t I be able to upgrade my Qi Purity as well with the amount of points I have?” Arthur said in response, remembering very well that the points needed for him to upgrade Qi Purity increased by a point per level. However, as he checked the amount of points needed for him to upgrade his Qi Purity to Tier 0, Grade 4, he noticed that he needed five points instead of four.

“1 point at Grade 1, 2 points at Grade 2, 3 points at Grade 3, and 5 points at Grade 4…” he muttered, feeling like he was getting onto something. Eventually, something clicked in his mind as he recalled that there was a famous mathematical sequence that followed the same pattern.

“Wait a second… isn’t this progression following that uh… Rigatoni sequence?” he asked, to which Sisa quickly corrected him. “If my knowledge serves me correctly, it’s called the Fibonacci sequence.”

“Ah, right. Fibonacci,” Arthur said, letting out an awkward chuckle. “I’m not that good at math, so I always reminded myself that the name of the sequence sounded similar to a type of pasta.”

“Not even close,” Sisa replied, deciding to move on from it as she told him, “In any case, you’re correct to speculate that way. The amount of points you would need to upgrade your stats do follow the Fibonacci sequence. However, the way these stats go through the progression differs from one another, so it’s up to you if you want to focus on one or the other depending on their progression.”

“Well, I’ll think about that for later,” Arthur replied, thinking that it wouldn’t make much difference. “For now, let’s focus on my two choices. What are the pros and cons if I choose one over the other?”

“Well, Qi Capacity is pretty self-explanatory. If you use all of your System Points on it, then you’d be able to use [Spirit Sense] for a longer time while still having enough qi to use for conversion. Or if your proficiency with [Qi Conversion] is high enough, then you could convert more qi into Inferior Spirit Slag in quick succession before having to wait for your qi to recover.”

“On the other hand, if you were to choose [Qi Conversion], you’d reduce the amount of time it takes for you to convert qi into Inferior Spirit Slag. That’s pretty much it, really,” Sisa concluded. “In any case, there’s not much cons to choosing one over the other. However, if you were to ask for my suggestion, then I’d suggest you upgrade both.”

“Guess I’ll upgrade both, then,” Arthur said as he allocated two of his points towards Qi Capacity and the remaining two towards upgrading [Qi Conversion]. Surprisingly, both of them went up by two levels, with the maximum amount of qi he could hold now being 12 points. As for [Qi Conversion], it went up to Level 3, reducing the amount of time it took for him to convert from one hour to 50 minutes. From the looks of it, each level reduced the amount of time by five minutes.

Although he felt satisfied at the fact that his stats were improving, Arthur knew very well that he had basically broken the balance between his conversion time and his qi recovery rate. From this point onward, if he didn’t pace himself, he would eventually have no qi to convert into Inferior Spirit Slag.

“Then again, I could just upgrade Qi Capacity to combat that,” he muttered to himself, continuing to convert his qi into Inferior Spirit Slag into more System Points soon after. Surprisingly, now that he had two more extra points of qi to spare, he decided to spend one of them to activate [Spirit Sense], allowing him to get a glimpse of the world at nighttime.

“Oh hey, a cow,” he could not help but say, piquing Sisa’s interest as she asked, “What is it doing?”

“You know, normal cow stuff. It’s just grazing around the area,” Arthur replied, thinking that it would be interesting if he relayed everything the cow did to Sisa while he was converting qi. “Ah. Surprisingly, it’s moving closer to the Inferior Spirit Slag I sent out earlier.”

“Now what is it doing?”

“It’s currently sniffing the slag… no, wait… it’s opening its mouth to… take a bite of it? Say, Sisa. Is Inferior Spirit Slag edible?”

“Nope. The cow is definitely in for a bad time.”

“Speaking of a bad time, the cow just let out a pained moo. Oh no… it just dropped a big one near where we are. Oh god… I can still see bits of Inferior Spirit Slag in it.”

“Well, what do you know. A cow deciding to eat energized manure to transform it into actual manure. To think we’d see a lesson on the circle of life here.”

“...”

“…Please never say that again.”